136 Quotes by Adam Gopnik

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.

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.

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

... 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.

I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

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

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

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?

I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.