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

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

Adam Gopnik

Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe in...

Adam Gopnik

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

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

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

Adam Gopnik

It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or ru...

Adam Gopnik

This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy.... his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and "The Wind in the Willows"--big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children's book. The story told by...

Adam Gopnik

[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startli...

Adam Gopnik

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.

Adam Gopnik

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

All the media of modern consciousness—from the printing press to radio and the movies—were used just as readily by authoritarian reactionaries, and then by modern totalitarians, to reduce liberty and enforce conformity as they ever were by libert...

Adam Gopnik

[A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan.

Adam Gopnik

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

Author Bio

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