Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Everything
Right
Something
Attacked
Sides
Possible
Wrong
Also

More quotes by 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
Image
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
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
Frauds master our minds magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
Adam Gopnik
Image
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
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
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
Image
In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
Adam Gopnik
Image
Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
Adam Gopnik
Image
I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them. I think if journalists start doing that then they won't be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won't be practicing satire.
Adam Gopnik
Image
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
Image
Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
Adam Gopnik
Image
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
Image
Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
Adam Gopnik
Image
... 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.
Adam Gopnik
Image
Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
Adam Gopnik
Image
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
Image
I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak more agreeably balanced when I write.
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
Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
Adam Gopnik