Adam Gopnik Quotes
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What typically emerges from looking at kids, gifted and ordinary, is that, from the kids’ point of view, accomplishment, that is, the private sense of mastery, the hard thing suddenly made easy, counts for far more in their inner lives than does the achievement-the competition won, the reward secured.
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Accomplishment, the feeling of absorption in the flow, of mastery for its own sake, of knowing how to do this thing, is what keeps all of us doing what we do, if we like what we do at all.
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I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
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The truth is made worse by the reality that no one-really no one-anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life.
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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.
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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.
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We know we’ve come to a crossroads when German childhood is being held up as an idealized model for Americans.
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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.
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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.
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There appear to be as many learning styles among prodigies as there are prodigies to express them.
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Teaching kids to become something other than what they were born to be is probably impossible; teaching them to behave in ways that seem unnatural to them at the start is actually not that hard.
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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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.
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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.
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I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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Andre Agassi, in his account of becoming an embittered prodigy, seems never to have liked tennis much, except as a vehicle for achievement. The kids who do like life inside the lines can find the flow within that green-and-white geometry.
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What sustains us in any competition are the moments of interiority when the competition vanishes; what sustains us in any struggle are the moments when we forget the struggle.
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We disapprove of parental hovering not because it won’t pay off later-it might; it does!-but because it’s obnoxious now.
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With all the effort in the world, the results of cramming kids are likely to be more ambiguous than we can predict, not because the child rearing was done wrong but because all such results tend to be ambiguous.