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" Fashion is about fantasy. "
Rumaan Alam
Fashion
About
Fantasy
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" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Women
Men
Society
" I don't want the staggeringly wealthy Elton John and his family to represent the standard of gay fatherhood any more than straight people want the stunningly beautiful Angelina Jolie and her family to represent the standard of heterosexual parenthood. Stars are outliers; stars are exceptions. "
Rumaan Alam
People
Stars
Gay
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Well
You
Life
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Color
Imagination
Children
" If writing really is empathy, then understanding your place in society might actually help you achieve it. "
Rumaan Alam
Writing
Help
Empathy
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Reading
Blue
People
" I am a binge reader, with a tendency to throw myself at a writer, immerse myself in their work. "
Rumaan Alam
Myself
Am
Writer
" When you are young, it's deeply annoying to be told that certain things are a condition of your youth. There's almost always some condescension in the proposition that your reality, your hopes, your frustrations, are just a condition of your age, that what feels unique to you is a very common thing after all. "
Rumaan Alam
Reality
Unique
Young
" I love fiction's ability to allow me to inhabit a wholly different life. "
Rumaan Alam
Life
Ability
Me
" Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist. "
Rumaan Alam
Confident
Fine
Novelist
" Truly smart people and truly smart dressers share one thing in common: They make it look easy. "
Rumaan Alam
Look
Easy
Smart
" 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
" Time is a finite resource. "
Rumaan Alam
Resource
Finite
Time
" Subtlety doesn't work with kids. "
Rumaan Alam
Kids
Work
Subtlety
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
People
Present
Son
" Parenting is love, sure, but it's as much about receiving love as it is giving it. Parenthood is a kind of vanity. "
Rumaan Alam
Parenting
Vanity
Giving
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Own
Women
Everyone
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
History
Parents
Story
" I have a theory that because my kitchen is small, you can't preheat an oven and deal with dough at the same time, although maybe it's just that I'm a bad baker. "
Rumaan Alam
Time
Bad
Same
" Usually, when you see clothes on a model, by some transitive property, that garment is imbued with her beauty. "
Rumaan Alam
Her
Beauty
See
" Parenting advice is mostly useless because every family is uniquely its own; artistic advice is mostly useless because every artist works in their own way. Thus, figuring out how to balance the two has an intense specificity. "
Rumaan Alam
Balance
Parenting
Advice
" Nothing is ever ideal. You have to work all the same. "
Rumaan Alam
Nothing
You
Work
" That a friendship ends doesn't mean it was weak from the outset; that it ends says nothing about its importance. "
Rumaan Alam
About
Weak
Mean
" Baking is a matter of precision and timing, but I just make things up as I go. "
Rumaan Alam
Up
Baking
Timing
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Cute
Baby
American
" If you can't empathize with other people, then you will never really be able to write well about them. "
Rumaan Alam
Never
You
Write
" Children's literature - the product of adult guesswork - often fails to account for its audience's slippery grasp on the world. "
Rumaan Alam
Literature
World
Audience
" 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
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Damn
Seems
Nice
" I married the man I love when the state of California said I could. We made a family through adoption, as New York State said we could. From the outside, our family - two dads, two sons via adoption - seems like an experiment, but what family isn't an experiment? "
Rumaan Alam
Love
Man
Family