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" Fiction is just lying. "
Rumaan Alam
Lying
Just
Fiction
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" To be five years old is to be surprised by life. I'm amused by my children's awe at quotidian things - a toy helicopter, a bubble bath, the visible tentacles on a plate of calamari. And I'm envious of their ability to attain something I often can't: a state of transcendence induced by art. "
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Bubble
Old
Life
" 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. "
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Enough
Performance
Attention
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Form ossifies into genre through repetition. "
Rumaan Alam
Repetition
Form
Through
" 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
" 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
" I work when I'm alone, but I have children and a family and a job, so alone time is at a premium. "
Rumaan Alam
Alone
Family
Job
" It is true for my family and many others: Adoption has made us infinitely richer in the ways that matter most. "
Rumaan Alam
Us
Family
Matter
" 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
" With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women. "
Rumaan Alam
Respect
Parenting
Men
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Think
Glasses
Age
" I'm not black myself, but my sons are. "
Rumaan Alam
Sons
Myself
Black
" Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist. "
Rumaan Alam
Confident
Fine
Novelist
" Summer is meant to be for travel, for exploration, for leisure, but sometimes budgets and schedules dictate otherwise. "
Rumaan Alam
Sometimes
Travel
Exploration
" 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
" 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
" Fashion is about fantasy. "
Rumaan Alam
Fashion
About
Fantasy
" For a long time, I thought that I was an enlightened parent by virtue of being an enlightened person. What a fool. "
Rumaan Alam
Time
Parent
Being
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Grow
Husband
Parents
" Wishing there were more children's books like 'The Snowy Day' is a bit like wishing there were more grownup books like 'Anna Karenina.' There are only so many masterpieces out there. "
Rumaan Alam
Like
Children
Day
" Men's fashion's tendency toward uniformity promises little fun, but at least it offers this: If I wear sweatpants and sneakers, I can pass as the American it's safest to be. "
Rumaan Alam
Men
Promises
American
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" The culture looms much larger than you do as a parent, and one can hardly rely on the culture to impart the lesson that womanhood is valuable. "
Rumaan Alam
You
Culture
Lesson
" 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
" 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. "
Rumaan Alam
Family
Cares
Your