Adam Gopnik
Adam Gopnik
Adam Gopnikis 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
scandal brutality moral
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
flavor humans human-beings
Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
powerful mean giving
The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
wine mean thinking
Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
mind bugs essentials
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.
loneliness feelings being-free
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.
writing thinking speak
I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
book kids long
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist.
heart hands paris
Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.
art skills drawing
Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
thinking good-times sometimes
Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
player drawing risk
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.
education art degrees
Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
drawing shapes shade
Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.