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" 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. "

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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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Contemporary families can be made in many ways. You might step up when relatives or friends are unable to meet their obligation to their children. You might marry someone who is already a parent. Or you might, as in my case, yearn to create a family and decide to adopt. "

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

" Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist. "

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

" My husband and I adopted our children through a private agency, Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children. As a nonprofit organization, it relies on client fees as well as donor support to do its work. "

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

Rumaan Alam

Liberty

Live

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

Rumaan Alam

Think

Social

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

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" You can't control what's going to happen to the book you're about to publish. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Form ossifies into genre through repetition. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" Children's picture books are a unique record of social evolution: in gender roles and racial politics, as is much discussed, but also in fashion and interior design. "

" Lindsay Hatton's novel 'Monterey Bay' so beautifully evokes the landscape of the titular locale, you'll feel transported to Northern California even if you're reading it on the bus on your morning commute. "