A Quote by Adam Gopnik

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.
I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.
Science means constantly walking a tightrope between blind faith and curiosity; between expertise and creativity; between bias and openness; between experience and epiphany; between ambition and passion; and between arrogance and conviction - in short, between an old today and a new tomorrow.
Historians and journalists always have agendas, but if I want to find out what's going on in South Africa, I read Nadine Gordimer or John Coetzee because they offer novelistic truth.
All changes in space which we see, hear, smell or taste are literally tactile impressions. All our senses are variations of our unique sense of touch. Two approaching objects touch one another when they finally meet without a noticeable space between them. ... This is what happens in any condensing matter in which the outer aspects move towards a centre... Each single part of matter approaches its neighboring part until the two collide, causing an impact or a pressure. It is space, which appears and disappears between and round object and in the movements of the particles of the object.
Learn to laugh. Seriousness is a sin, and it is a disease. Laughter has tremendous beauty, a lightness. It will bring lightness to you, and it will give you wings to fly.
Nadine Gordimer came over just before she died. She didn't want to talk about books or the arts, but about the abuse of the constitution by the government.
The late Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, for example, had a wonderful ability to get her country's injustices and contradictions down on paper. Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
My books - I kid you not - are very often shelved between DeLillo and de Sade. Which not only completely cracks me up, but it seems like an encouraging message from the universe: between those two, there's a lot of wiggle room. I feel just fine there.
The more high technology around us, the more the need for human touch...HighTech/High Touch. The principle symbolizes the need for balance between our physical and spiritual reality.
Like every New Yorker, I have a love/hate relationship with the city. There are times it's overbearing, but when I'm away even for a little while, I can't wait to get home. I am a New Yorker.
What matters is not the isolated entity, but the space between things, the relationship of things – the Bond…Every conflict that occurs – whether between husband and wife, social or racial groups – is resolved only when we can fully see and embrace the space – the Bond – between us.
The idea of, say, the compressed space between the floor and the object hanging over it and then the long space between the object and the ceiling was a kind of interesting idea for me - the idea of compressing and expanding. That was an idea that I worked with, which you could only do sculpturally. You can't really do with a painting on the wall.
In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active. It was in that space, paradoxically, the painting 'took place.' Then, little by little, and to some extent deliberately, I made it go the other way, opening up an interior space... so that there was a layered, shallow depth.
I had always spoken about the space between the art object and the person looking at it as this dynamic space, which I referred to over and over. So the idea of the space between two things was sort of interesting to me.
We all have different brow bones, and different amounts of space between the eyebrow and the lashes; the space on the upper lid is bigger or smaller, the space on the bridge of the nose or between the eyes is wider or narrower. Everyone is different.
In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future.
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