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" 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. "

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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. "

Rumaan Alam

Lunch

Dinner

Know

" Fashion is about fantasy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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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. "

" 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. "

" Some writers are prolific; some are shape-shifters. It's rare and intimidating to encounter one who is both. "

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

" 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. "

" Summer is meant to be for travel, for exploration, for leisure, but sometimes budgets and schedules dictate otherwise. "

" Writing takes gall. I like to think that's true even for writers with several books under their belt, writers who have been doing it for years. It takes something - guts, gumption, self-delusion - to ask for a reader's time when we all know there's nothing new under the sun; that it's all been said, or written, before. "

" 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. "

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

" I work when I'm alone, but I have children and a family and a job, so alone time is at a premium. "

" Children's literature - the product of adult guesswork - often fails to account for its audience's slippery grasp on the world. "

" Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Usually, when you see clothes on a model, by some transitive property, that garment is imbued with her beauty. "

" One of the many American ideals that make no sense at all is that we're all a million rugged individualists marching in lockstep. We dress accordingly, at least the men. If it's always been thus, I yearn for the halcyon days of the man in the gray flannel suit because at least that guy had some flair. "

" We have all come from a woman in some fashion. "

" 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. "

Rumaan Alam

Myself

Work

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Rumaan Alam

Power

Time

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

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

" I reject the notion that one should feel guilty about what you don't know. "

" Nothing is ever ideal. You have to work all the same. "

" 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. "