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" 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. "

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" There is a tendency to presume autobiography in fiction by women or minorities. Guys named Jonathan write universal stories, while there's this sense that everyone else is just fictionalizing their own small experiences. "

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

" 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 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. "

" Is deciding what you like an instinct, a sense that arrives as swiftly as my autoimmune response to cat dander? Or is it the result of reasoned consideration, the way wine tasters swish pinot noir around in their mouths, spit it out, and reach for complex metaphors about chocolate and tobacco? "

" When we had our first son, four different people gave us the same present: a copy of Ezra Jack Keats' 'The Snowy Day.' A new child often inspires duplicate gifts - we were given a dozen mostly useless baby blankets, just one more thing to spit up on - but this one was different. "

" Kids are the ultimate trump card: a way to get out of co-op board meetings or lunch with a friend you don't want to see or your brother-in-law's set at a comedy club. It's fair to use your kids as an excuse to sidestep what you don't want to do; it's less fair to blame them for not being able to achieve what you do want to do. "

" I didn't know, at 22, that everything that happens to you, the good stuff as well as the less-good stuff, accrues and becomes your life. "

" When I look at the list of my favorite works, writers who are women do tend to outnumber writers who are men for whatever reason. "

" I mourn for the kind of dad I didn't have; I rue my first broken family while taking joy in the one that I've made. "

" 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. "

" Shot glasses make me think of youth and a mode of drinking and living that was never mine, even when I was the age for it. "

" I'm not black myself, but my sons are. "

" Summer is meant to be for travel, for exploration, for leisure, but sometimes budgets and schedules dictate otherwise. "

" I reject the notion that one should feel guilty about what you don't know. "

" Instead of a passion for the Yankees or fly-fishing or birding, I want to pass on to my sons a love of books, music, and art. I accept that this is partly about the gratification of my own ego, but it's also one of the only ways I know of making a rich life. That's what we all want for our progeny. "

" When my husband and I first became parents, we joked that our chubby baby was destined to grow into an Alex P. Keaton Reaganite - the most unlikely, and therefore hilarious, course for the child of an interracial gay couple in gentrifying Brooklyn. "

" It's not that a literature for children of color doesn't exist; it's that so much of the extant literature is lacking in the essential quality that makes literature for children so extraordinary a form: imagination. "

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

" This tension between ambition and parenthood, that's not a reckoning that many men face. There are plenty of men who say, 'Oh, I need to be there for my kids, and I can't do x or y professionally,' but for the most part, that's a struggle that belongs to women in society. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think it's a not-uncommon experience for gay boys, young men, and even older men to spend a lot of time in the company of women. "

" Some writers are prolific; some are shape-shifters. It's rare and intimidating to encounter one who is both. "

" 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. "

" Years ago, I worked at a fashion magazine. I was the lowest man on the totem pole, one of the only men on that particular pole: a little brother with a dozen older sisters whose grace and glamour I so admired. "

" 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. "

" I think that in the cultural imagination, motherhood has a primacy that fatherhood just doesn't; and that's not to say that there aren't many fathers who are active and engaged and for whom that is their life's passion. But somehow, in the imagination, there's something different about maternity. "