Top 70 Adam Gopnik Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.”

— Adam Gopnik

2. “What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.”

— Adam Gopnik

3. “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.”

— Adam Gopnik

4. “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.”

— Adam Gopnik

5. “Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.”

— Adam Gopnik

6. “Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.”

— Adam Gopnik

7. “The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.”

— Adam Gopnik

8. “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.”

— Adam Gopnik

9. “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.”

— Adam Gopnik

10. “You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.”

— Adam Gopnik

11. “The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.”

— Adam Gopnik

12. “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

13. “After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.”

— Adam Gopnik

14. “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.”

— Adam Gopnik

15. “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

16. “Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners.”

— Adam Gopnik

17. “For all the years I’d spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?”

— Adam Gopnik

18. “Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.”

— Adam Gopnik

19. “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.”

— Adam Gopnik

20. “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.”

— Adam Gopnik

21. “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.”

— Adam Gopnik

22. “There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.”

— Adam Gopnik

23. “American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World.”

— Adam Gopnik

24. “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.”

— Adam Gopnik

25. “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

26. “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

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

— Adam Gopnik

28. “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.”

— Adam Gopnik

29. “Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.”

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

31. “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 its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.”

— Adam Gopnik

32. “Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.”

— Adam Gopnik

33. “What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are – the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.”

— Adam Gopnik

34. “Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.”

— Adam Gopnik

35. “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 having spoken English loudly enough.”

— Adam Gopnik

36. “I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.”

— Adam Gopnik

37. “Big writers become a kind of shared climate.”

— Adam Gopnik

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

— Adam Gopnik

39. “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.”

— Adam Gopnik

40. “We surf the waves of capitalism, from crest to trough and back again, but the funny thing is that no matter how often we ride the wave, nobody notices that it’s wet. When we are on the crest, we believe that we have climbed a mountain through our own virtuous efforts, and when we are in the trough, we believe that we have fallen into a pit through out own vice.”

— Adam Gopnik

41. “Can’t repeat the past? We do it every day. We build a life, or try to, of pleasures and duties that will become routine, so that every day will be the same day, or nearly so, “the day of our life,” Randall Jarrell called it.”

— Adam Gopnik

42. “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

43. “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

44. “Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.”

— Adam Gopnik

45. “I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.”

— Adam Gopnik

46. “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.”

— Adam Gopnik

47. “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

48. “Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.”

— Adam Gopnik

49. “Smith believed not that markets make men free but that free men move toward markets. The difference is small but decisive; it is most of what we mean by humanism.”

— Adam Gopnik

50. “Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.”

— Adam Gopnik