Quotes

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.

Sometimes, it's best to let the kids take control - and it's never too early to instill positive eating habits or self-confidence in the kitchen.

Religious traditions are easy to lose sight of in today's marketing frenzy. Make sure you take time to gently usher your little ones into the rituals that have special meaning for you.

For many families, gift-giving is a major source of stress - the relentless commercialism, the whining demands, the financial pressure.

A holiday vacation can mean sampling all kinds of new cuisine - whether it's Uncle Joe's award-winning chili or the exotic flavors of Nepal. If your little ones are fussy, be sure to ease mealtime hassles by bringing along a supply of the familiar foods they're accustomed to rejecting at home.

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.

Ultimately, very few people parent their kids in ways that strike anybody else as reasoned, appropriate or sane.

When it comes right down to it, developing a critical sensibility about parenting isn't really about disapproval; it's about honing your own sensibilities, figuring out how you want to parent.

The publishing industry stopped having new ideas out of respect for the untimely death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961 and has been doing everything the same way ever since.

To capture sound is to isolate a moment, canonize it, enter it into the historical register.

Look closely, and you can see where the grooves of a record widen, indicating a sparseness that can only be a bass solo, or grow denser to accommodate a cresting density of sound.

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.

I've planned book tours for myself, whether or not anybody wants to hear what I have to say. I've weighed in on things like what the cover looks like, what the copy looks like, how it's going to be promoted - just every aspect of it.

I've always been really involved in figuring out who my audience is and how to reach them.

My approach is to treat writing very much as a job.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The goal has been not to get pigeonholed. I like working in different genres. I'm gonna try to be entertaining and funny and do my usual thing.

When I'm writing, I'm in an isolation chamber. I'm not one to think about that outside world stuff when I'm writing.

As a writer, I've always been somebody who's been productive and hustled hard.

Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.