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" I don't have a Winslow Homer or a Renoir, but I do have the liberty to live as I like. "

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

" 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. "

" Truly smart people and truly smart dressers share one thing in common: They make it look easy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I've spent many hours of my life browsing in stores. At 21, I admired clothes I couldn't afford. At 30, I bought them. At 40, I sometimes go simply for the pleasure, of seeing what is new, of learning what counts as beautiful now. "

" 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. "

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

" Fashion is about fantasy. "

" 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. "

" If you can't empathize with other people, then you will never really be able to write well about them. "

" I didn't know, at 22, that regret is useless. If I could go back and change something - give myself some big break, pass along some secret information, reassure myself that most things would, in fact, work out - I don't think I would. "

" Shopping for clothes is time consuming, it's tiring, and it can feel like a waste of an autumn afternoon. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

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

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

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

" I'm a square. I always wanted the standard-issue American dream: beautiful home, loving husband, couple of kids. I met another square, and we got married; a year later, we had a baby; three years later, had another. "

" 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. "

" Obama-as-dad is my favorite Obama. Obama-as-executive, with his stubborn faith in reasonableness in times absent of reason, presided over the country during its descent into madness. I find it a comfort that Obama-as-dad presided over a family that leaves the White House healthy and happy. "