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" 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

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

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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. "

" Family is whatever you say it is. "

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

" 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. "

" Parenting is love, sure, but it's as much about receiving love as it is giving it. Parenthood is a kind of vanity. "

" That a friendship ends doesn't mean it was weak from the outset; that it ends says nothing about its importance. "

" 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. "

" If writing really is empathy, then understanding your place in society might actually help you achieve it. "

" 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. "

" Fashion is about fantasy. "

" 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

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Day

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

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" It is true for my family and many others: Adoption has made us infinitely richer in the ways that matter most. "

Rumaan Alam

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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. "

" I work when I work, and that is often dictated by the things I cannot control. "

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

" 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 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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" 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. "