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All Quotes by author - Rumaan Alam

" Among this country's enduring myths is that success is virtuous, while the wealth by which we measure success is incidental. We tell ourselves that money cannot buy happiness, but what is incontrovertible is that money buys stuff, and if stuff makes you happy, well, complete the syllogism. "

" A writer cannot be judged for his project, only its execution. "

" Baking is a matter of precision and timing, but I just make things up as I go. "

" Because the designers at Baby Gap and Crew Cuts have determined it would be cute if kids dressed like their dads, seemingly every American male between 2 and 52 dresses identically. "

" Before the arrival of my first son, I gave up on the moribund business of magazine publishing, where I had long dreamed of a career, and went to work in advertising. That I could be paid great money to write was incredibly hard to believe. "

" Blackness, any sort of difference, is not a burden. Relegating blackness or other sorts of difference to serious books that explicitly engage with issues creates a context in which it can seem like one. "

" By a considerable margin, my family's largest-ever financial expenditure was the adoption of our two sons. "

" Checking your phone during dinner is no less rude than reading 'People' during dinner, which I once saw a woman do at Blue Ribbon Brooklyn as she dined with her husband/boyfriend/whatever. "

" Children are weird. I was going to say 'most children,' but I think this a rare universal law. "

" Children's books deal in idealized worlds, so they're a document of how our notion of ideal worlds has changed over time. "

" Children's literature - the product of adult guesswork - often fails to account for its audience's slippery grasp on the world. "

" Children's picture books are a unique record of social evolution: in gender roles and racial politics, as is much discussed, but also in fashion and interior design. "

" Class is very, very fertile territory for American artists, and it has been for a long time. "

" Contemporary families can be made in many ways. You might step up when relatives or friends are unable to meet their obligation to their children. You might marry someone who is already a parent. Or you might, as in my case, yearn to create a family and decide to adopt. "

" Does a bona fide chimichurri have cilantro in it? Who cares? Cooking for your family, unless your family includes Joel Rubouchon, is liberating in that regard. "

" Every Christmas, I cook an elaborate Mexican dinner. "

" Everyone on Twitter - everyone on the Internet - seems so damn certain. Brevity doesn't allow for nuance, and it's a nice complement to confidence. "

" Every sense has the power to transport us through time, but it's taste I find the most mysterious, and writing about it often results in tortured metaphors. "

" Family is whatever you say it is. "

" Fashion has underscored the interchangeability of men for a long time, maybe from the outset. "

" Fashion is about fantasy. "

" Fiction is just lying. "

" For a long time, I thought that I was an enlightened parent by virtue of being an enlightened person. What a fool. "

" For many writers, the endless performance of being a writer - tweeting, appearing, making the rounds - is required simply to attract enough attention to make a living. "

" Form ossifies into genre through repetition. "

" Genre is a useful thing when organizing texts in a bookshop but immaterial to the particular exchange between writer and reader. "

" History is a story like any other, but black history is a story so devoid of logic that it frustrates the young reader. The young readers in my house, told of slavery and segregation, asked in disbelief, 'What? Why?' We - the parents of black children, the parents of all children - still need to tell that story. "

" I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It's such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can't think too deeply about that when I'm working, or I'd never get anything down on the page. "

" I am a binge reader, with a tendency to throw myself at a writer, immerse myself in their work. "

" I am not anti-Internet, and I don't think smart phones are a social ill. "

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