Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Eating is one of the great pleasures of life.
The trains were the beating heart of the New York graffiti scene.
I came up in hip-hop, where people value the ability to tell it straight.
As a writer, I've always been somebody who's been productive and hustled hard.
America has not produced a more salient political musician than Gil Scott-Heron.
I've always been really involved in figuring out who my audience is and how to reach them.
To capture sound is to isolate a moment, canonize it, enter it into the historical register.
I like to read in the bathtub. Ideally, that bathtub would be located on a small Greek island.
No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.
Fundamentally, I'm profoundly influenced by hip-hop, so whatever I do is going to bear that seal.
If you're a novelist, as I am in real life, you're usually so desperate for any kind of feedback.
One thing any DJ needs in his crate, especially at a barbecue, is a selection of 15-minute-plus jams.
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.
Ultimately, very few people parent their kids in ways that strike anybody else as reasoned, appropriate or sane.
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.
My mother is really the person I learned to curse from. She discourages me from saying that in interviews. But it's true.
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.
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.
Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.
For many families, gift-giving is a major source of stress - the relentless commercialism, the whining demands, the financial pressure.
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.
There is perhaps no better way to appreciate the dizzying stupidity of the United States than to chat with 25 consecutive morning radio hosts.
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.
My wife likes me to point out that she puts our daughter down to sleep more often than I do, which gives me time to write stupid books about it.
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.
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.
While I'm working, I stick with music that won't distract me - the dub stylings of Scientist and King Tubby, maybe some Beethoven string quartets.
To me, 'The End of the Jews' - both the title and the novel itself - is about the end of pat, uncritical ways of understanding oneself in the world.
If anything, I was a prodigious eater of everything that was put in front of me. That was probably the only thing my parents wouldn't complain about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think there's a lot of anxiety about being seen as a bad parent. There's still a lot of subjects that I think people aren't entirely comfortable being honest about.
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.
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.
Novels are pirated all the time, but it's hard to imagine that you're at work and you open up the attachment that your brother sent you and it's the new Phillip Roth novel.
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 Pushcart War' is presented as a history of a conflict that has not yet taken place; in each edition of the book, the date on which the hostilities commenced is nudged forward.
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.
We had a kid. The kid was awesome. She didn't fall asleep easily. We complained about it. We got frustrated. But we didn't look for an out. We just accepted that this was part of parenting.
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.
I believe that writers have a responsibility to evolve the language, whether by introducing new words or new usages. Shakespeare alone is responsible for something like 3400 words and phrases.
The genius of vinyl is that it allows - commands! - us to put our fingerprints all over that history: to blend and chop and reconfigure it, mock and muse upon it, backspin and skip through it.
I like to write in coffee shops in countries in which languages I do not speak are spoken. That way, you're surrounded by the buzz of humanity, but you aren't distracted by people's conversations.
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.