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" Children's books deal in idealized worlds, so they're a document of how our notion of ideal worlds has changed over time. "
Rumaan Alam
Books
Time
Over
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" Nothing is ever ideal. You have to work all the same. "
Rumaan Alam
Nothing
You
Work
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Politics
Fashion
Picture
" The person most qualified to tell the tale of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the man himself, as gifted an intellect as he is an athlete. "
Rumaan Alam
Most
Athlete
Man
" Summer is meant to be for travel, for exploration, for leisure, but sometimes budgets and schedules dictate otherwise. "
Rumaan Alam
Sometimes
Travel
Exploration
" Form ossifies into genre through repetition. "
Rumaan Alam
Repetition
Form
Through
" That's part of fashion's promise: that a girlfriend or boyfriend or a promotion are just one tie or sweater or pair of shoes away. "
Rumaan Alam
Shoes
Sweater
Fashion
" Fiction is just lying. "
Rumaan Alam
Lying
Just
Fiction
" I reject the notion that one should feel guilty about what you don't know. "
Rumaan Alam
About
Guilty
Know
" My husband and I adopted our children through a private agency, Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children. As a nonprofit organization, it relies on client fees as well as donor support to do its work. "
Rumaan Alam
Children
Work
Organization
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Great
Business
Work
" Subtlety doesn't work with kids. "
Rumaan Alam
Kids
Work
Subtlety
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Like
Difference
Burden
" There are probably some readers who don't want a great American writer to acknowledge that cleaning out the bottom drawer of the refrigerator has ever crossed their mind. "
Rumaan Alam
Mind
American
Cleaning
" Shopping for clothes is time consuming, it's tiring, and it can feel like a waste of an autumn afternoon. "
Rumaan Alam
Shopping
Clothes
Time
" I know I've had a charmed experience of being a parent, with healthy kids, a helpful partner, access to good day care, and great public schools. "
Rumaan Alam
Good
Great
Good Day
" I do think that I have a sensitivity to the depictions of maybe all minorities in literature. And I think that the experience of people who look like me is so rarely captured in big, mainstream American fiction that you tend to sort of empathize with any character of color who pops up. "
Rumaan Alam
Think
Experience
People
" Genre is a useful thing when organizing texts in a bookshop but immaterial to the particular exchange between writer and reader. "
Rumaan Alam
Writer
Useful
Exchange
" If you've ever watched a television cartoon, you know that kids don't appreciate subtlety, though perhaps that's because they're not often offered it. "
Rumaan Alam
Television
Appreciate
Know
" When you are what we call a 'minority writer,' a writer of color, a writer of any kind of difference, there is some kind of presumption of autobiography in everything you produce. And I find that really maddening, and I resist that. "
Rumaan Alam
Color
Call
You
" A writer cannot be judged for his project, only its execution. "
Rumaan Alam
Execution
Cannot
Only
" I am a binge reader, with a tendency to throw myself at a writer, immerse myself in their work. "
Rumaan Alam
Myself
Am
Writer
" Lindsay Hatton's novel 'Monterey Bay' so beautifully evokes the landscape of the titular locale, you'll feel transported to Northern California even if you're reading it on the bus on your morning commute. "
Rumaan Alam
Landscape
You
Morning
" Every Christmas, I cook an elaborate Mexican dinner. "
Rumaan Alam
Mexican
Every
Dinner
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Writing
Art
Life
" I work when I work, and that is often dictated by the things I cannot control. "
Rumaan Alam
Control
Often
Work
" Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist. "
Rumaan Alam
Confident
Fine
Novelist
" When I was somewhere between child and adult, my father left us. My first family broke apart, but this liberated me to create a new family as I pleased. "
Rumaan Alam
Family
New
Me
" With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women. "
Rumaan Alam
Respect
Parenting
Men
" I am not anti-Internet, and I don't think smart phones are a social ill. "
Rumaan Alam
Am
Think
Social
" In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels. "
Rumaan Alam
American
Famous
Great