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Adam Gopnik Biography

Adam Gopnik (born August 24, 1956) is an American writer and essayist. He is best known as a staff writer for The New Yorker—to which he has contributed non-fiction, fiction, memoir and criticism since 1986—and as the author of the essay collection Paris to the Moon, an account of five years that Gopnik, his wife Martha, and son Luke spent in the French capital.

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Adam Gopnik Quotes

If you're being attacked from all sides, it's possible you're doing something right; it's also possible that you are doing everything wrong.

Sides, Ifs, Right, Everything, Wrong

Wit and puns aren't just decor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Bugs, Decor, Essentials, Mind, Wit

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

Defined, Knows, Leaves, Light, Paper, Traces

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.

Basic, Desire, Loyalty, Malevolence, Past, Petty

Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.

Bending, Drawing, Line, Perversity, Player, Risk

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.

Accomplishment, Adults, Place, Professional, Relief, Table

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

Cooking, Domesticity, Showy, Side, Sides

Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.

Applies, Art, Beautiful, Ideas, Song

Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can't say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.

Joy, Said, Say, True, Writing, Written

I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.

Classic, Coffee, Meal, New York, Skip, Thinking

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Evidence, Good Times, Having, Outward, Sometimes, Thinking

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Being Free, Feelings, Having, Inseparable, Loneliness

I don't think there's any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that - that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.

Journalists, Practice, Thinking, Tries, Trying

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.

Guys, Side, Sound, Winning, Writing, Your Side

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

Coffee, Food, Food Culture, Growing Up, Things, Together

If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent. 'Credibility' is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we'll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.

People, Causes, World, Interest, Everyone, Defined

All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.

Detachment, Littles, Quality, Secret, Tastes

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

Everyone, Listening, Might, Past, Said, Stanton

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

America, Gulag, Height, People, Supervision, Under

Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum; the reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution perhaps the first modern political institution.

Believe, Decorum, Hangover, Institution, Political, Reality

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