Quotes by Adam Gopnik

About Adam Gopnik:

Adam Gopnik is a Canadian American writer, essayist and commentator. 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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Oliver, success is usually a feeling of mere relief, where failure is pain. Happiness, you see, lies in neither, but in sticking to a daily ritual and becoming absorbed in something useful. When the war is over, even the greatest warriors do not exul...

Adam Gopnik

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet havin...

Adam Gopnik

There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the feelings.

Adam Gopnik

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Adam Gopnik

Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too--a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here. As a kid, I grasped that the ...

Adam Gopnik

I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There's New York, this wonderful city, I'll go live there someday. Even bein...

Adam Gopnik

The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.

Adam Gopnik

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

Adam Gopnik

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

Adam Gopnik

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.

Adam Gopnik

The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.

Adam Gopnik

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.

Adam Gopnik

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

Adam Gopnik

There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in it...

Adam Gopnik

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.

Adam Gopnik

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

Adam Gopnik

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

Adam Gopnik

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.

Adam Gopnik

I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

Adam Gopnik

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

Adam Gopnik

Author Bio

  • NameAdam Gopnik
  • DescriptionAmerican journalist
  • BornAugust 24, 1956
  • CountryUnited States Of America; Canada
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Journalist
  • AwardsGeorge Polk Award