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.
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.
drawing shapes shade
Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
photography sleep emotional
... a fact about photography: we can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
ideas giving feelings
Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share. You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
choices-made mind easy
Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
magic mind mazes
Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
sex writing self
Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
cooking sides showy
Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
eerie space long
In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
secret quality littles
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.
stuff way bookstores
In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
stars rocks add
I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
spinning rewards carousels
After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.