Top 60 Rumaan Alam Quotes

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.

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.

There are probably some readers who don’t want a great American writer to acknowledge that cleaning out the bottom drawer of the refrigerator has ever crossed their mind.

Fashion has underscored the interchangeability of men for a long time, maybe from the outset.

It comforts the adult conscience to remember that, amid history’s grave injustices, there were still great lives.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Every Christmas, I cook an elaborate Mexican dinner.

I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It’s such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can’t think too deeply about that when I’m working, or I’d never get anything down on the page.

In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels.

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.

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

When my husband and I first became parents, we joked that our chubby baby was destined to grow into an Alex P. Keaton Reaganite – the most unlikely, and therefore hilarious, course for the child of an interracial gay couple in gentrifying Brooklyn.

Fashion is about fantasy.

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.

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.

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.

Shot glasses make me think of youth and a mode of drinking and living that was never mine, even when I was the age for it.

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

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.

Class is very, very fertile territory for American artists, and it has been for a long time.

Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist.

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

Among this country’s enduring myths is that success is virtuous, while the wealth by which we measure success is incidental. We tell ourselves that money cannot buy happiness, but what is incontrovertible is that money buys stuff, and if stuff makes you happy, well, complete the syllogism.

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.

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.

Fiction is just lying.

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.

I’m a square. I always wanted the standard-issue American dream: beautiful home, loving husband, couple of kids. I met another square, and we got married; a year later, we had a baby; three years later, had another.

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

I don’t want the staggeringly wealthy Elton John and his family to represent the standard of gay fatherhood any more than straight people want the stunningly beautiful Angelina Jolie and her family to represent the standard of heterosexual parenthood. Stars are outliers; stars are exceptions.

We have all come from a woman in some fashion.

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.

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

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.

With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women.

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

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

I’m not black myself, but my sons are.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

When I look at the list of my favorite works, writers who are women do tend to outnumber writers who are men for whatever reason.

Form ossifies into genre through repetition.

Children are weird. I was going to say ‘most children,’ but I think this a rare universal law.

There is a tendency to presume autobiography in fiction by women or minorities. Guys named Jonathan write universal stories, while there’s this sense that everyone else is just fictionalizing their own small experiences.

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

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.

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.

Subtlety doesn’t work with kids.

Vanity is a sensitive subject for gay men.

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.