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" 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
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" 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. "
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" Vanity is a sensitive subject for gay men. "
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" We have all come from a woman in some fashion. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" If you can't empathize with other people, then you will never really be able to write well about them. "
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" 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. "
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" 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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" By a considerable margin, my family's largest-ever financial expenditure was the adoption of our two sons. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Subtlety doesn't work with kids. "
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" 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? "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" It's my own personal hang-up, but I find adults who are picky eaters to be the worst. I don't mean food allergies or preferences: I mean picky eaters. We all know one, and they're impossible to go to lunch with or invite over for a dinner party. "
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" I work when I'm alone, but I have children and a family and a job, so alone time is at a premium. "
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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. "
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" 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. "
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" Form ossifies into genre through repetition. "
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" 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. "
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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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" 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. "
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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. "
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" 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
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" 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. "
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" Some writers are prolific; some are shape-shifters. It's rare and intimidating to encounter one who is both. "
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