Quote

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

Adam Gopnik

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Keep
Writing
Block
Simplicity
Wall
Words
Often
Comes
Sense

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Wit and puns aren't just décor 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
Image
When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.
Adam Gopnik
Image
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
Image
The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
Adam Gopnik
Image
You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
Adam Gopnik
Image
I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.
Adam Gopnik
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
Adam Gopnik
Image
New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
Adam Gopnik
Image
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
Image
After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.
Adam Gopnik
Image
Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
Adam Gopnik
Image
I don't think there's any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that - that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.
Adam Gopnik
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.
Adam Gopnik
Image
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