Words matter. These are the best Adam Mansbach Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If you’re a novelist, as I am in real life, you’re usually so desperate for any kind of feedback.
I’ve probably done more than a thousand interviews, and I can’t remember what people asked me two months ago or two days ago.
There is perhaps no better way to appreciate the dizzying stupidity of the United States than to chat with 25 consecutive morning radio hosts.
One of the pleasures of getting older and making a living the way you want to is that your social circle becomes rarified, and the people who enter have been vetted.
Of course, the opposite of white privilege is not blackness, as many of us seemed to think then; the opposite of white privilege is working to dismantle that privilege. But my particular hip-hop generation proved to be very serious about figuring it all out and staying engaged.
I came up in hip-hop, where people value the ability to tell it straight.
It’s hilarious to me that by writing an obscene fake children’s book I am mistaken for a parenting expert.
I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there’s this conflation of race, culture and religion.
When the kid goes to bed, you get a little bit of time for yourself and maybe your partner, so being delayed in that departure can be particularly frustrating.
A good cookout ought to last at least six hours; if you haven’t eaten and gotten full and gotten hungry and eaten again, you’re doing something wrong.
Being Jewish is a big part of my artistic sensibility and my humor… I think it gives me a certain take on the world on a literary level.
In theory, parents are supposed to empathize with one other – find common cause in the fervent desire to preserve and protect the world for the next generation, and connect on some deep, almost mystical level that those poor souls who have not experienced this kind of all-consuming love cannot possibly comprehend.
One thing any DJ needs in his crate, especially at a barbecue, is a selection of 15-minute-plus jams.
Because Jews were kicked out of every country in Europe at one time or another, and plenty of other places as well, there isn’t an ability to identify with a national heritage – you’ll never hear a Jew say ‘I’m German’ or ‘I’m Polish,’ without saying something about being Jewish as well, and for good reason.
Vinyl is democratic, as surely as the iPod is fascist. Vinyl is representational: It has a face. Two faces, in fact, to represent the dualism of human nature. Vinyl occupies physical space honestly, proud as a fat woman dancing.
America has not produced a more salient political musician than Gil Scott-Heron.
I was a rapper and a DJ, and if you wanted to be involved in hip-hop, you had to be involved in the sonic, the kinetic and the visual aspects. The visual was graffiti.
I try to write in the mornings, as soon as I’m up and caffeinated, and to stay in the chair as long as I can be productive.
For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty of writing takes place in the act of not writing. It’s the procrastination, the thinking about writing that’s difficult.
The city fought a $300 million, 18-year war on graffiti. New York Mayor John Lindsay declared war in 1972, and the battle for the transit system came later.
No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.
My mother is really the person I learned to curse from. She discourages me from saying that in interviews. But it’s true.
My daughter is a very adventurous eater. I’m not the guy who sits around lamenting that all my kid will eat it is Tater Tots and chicken nuggets. With my kid, it’s more a capricious and whimsical decision-making.
Sleeping is one of the more private aspects of parenting; it happens in a quiet room, whereas eating is a more public aspect of parenting. Other people can see it and compare it to what their kids eat.
Ultimately, very few people parent their kids in ways that strike anybody else as reasoned, appropriate or sane.
Eating is one of the great pleasures of life.
To be a white kid into hip-hop meant you’d sought it out and you practiced the art. Which meant dedication and diligence, as well as removing yourself at least occasionally from your own comfort zone and circumstances, and from people who looked like you.
Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.
I’ve always been really involved in figuring out who my audience is and how to reach them.
The paradox of being in an industry where other people are usually the gatekeepers: publishers, editors – there are a lot of barriers to having control over your career. But coming out of hip-hop, the mindset was always to create your own.
For many families, gift-giving is a major source of stress – the relentless commercialism, the whining demands, the financial pressure.
Graffiti has an interesting relationship to the broader world of hip-hop: It’s part of the culture, but also in a weird way a stepchild of the culture.
Fundamentally, I’m profoundly influenced by hip-hop, so whatever I do is going to bear that seal.
There’s a lot of demand to hear the new Kanye West album before it hits the streets. There’s much less demand to read the new Phillip Roth novel.
For me, graffiti writers were always the fascinating eccentrics of hip-hop culture. What they do is secretive by definition, and not remunerative in any way.
