{"author":"Adam Gopnik","author_id":"Adam+Gopnik","total_quotes":22,"quotes":[{"text":"What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.","author":"Adam Gopnik","tags":["creativity"],"id":2322,"author_id":"Adam+Gopnik"},{"text":"Oliver, success is usually a feeling of mere relief, where failure is pain. Happiness, you see, lies in neither, but in sticking to a daily ritual and becoming absorbed in something useful. When the war is over, even the greatest warriors do not exult. They go back to their garden or kitchen or library -- or school -- and resume life.(as said by Mrs. Pearson).","author":"Adam Gopnik","tags":["inspirational","philosophical"],"id":40822,"author_id":"Adam+Gopnik"},{"text":"It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or running on parallel tracks.","author":"Adam Gopnik","tags":["experience","historians","history","journalism","journalists","scholars"],"id":42924,"author_id":"Adam+Gopnik"},{"text":"I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There's New York, this wonderful city, I'll go live there someday. Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any place that would let me sleep in it--a distant constellation of lights I had not yet been allowed to visit. I had arrived in Oz only to think, Well, you don't LIVE in Oz, do you?","author":"Adam Gopnik","tags":["new-york-city"],"id":71568,"author_id":"Adam+Gopnik"},{"text":"All the media of modern consciousness—from the printing press to radio and the movies—were used just as readily by authoritarian reactionaries, and then by modern totalitarians, to reduce liberty and enforce conformity as they ever were by libertarians to expand it.","author":"Adam Gopnik","tags":["art-and-life","media","modern-media"],"id":98173,"author_id":"Adam+Gopnik"},{"text":"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.","author":"Adam Gopnik","tags":["freedom","life","time","understanding"],"id":134239,"author_id":"Adam+Gopnik"},{"text":"This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy.... His arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and 'The Wind in the Willows'--big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children's book. The story told by 'The Lord of the Rings' is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied.","author":"Adam Gopnik","tags":["elder-edda","fantasy","j-r-r-tolkien","literature","romance","the-wind-in-the-willows"],"id":137961,"author_id":"Adam+Gopnik"},{"text":"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.","author":"Adam Gopnik","tags":["life","friends","wine "],"id":160696,"author_id":"Adam+Gopnik"},{"text":"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.","author":"Adam Gopnik","tags":["arguments","editorials","writing"],"id":172556,"author_id":"Adam+Gopnik"},{"text":"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.","author":"Adam Gopnik","tags":["books","children","fantasy","literature","reading"],"id":180567,"author_id":"Adam+Gopnik"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":22,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}