ADAM GOPNIK

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Student strike” has the same sort of emotional appeal to the French as “family farm” has in America.

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

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.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

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.

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

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

New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.