Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Fiction is just lying.
Time is a finite resource.
Writer's block is a fiction.
Subtlety doesn't work with kids.
I'm not black myself, but my sons are.
Vanity is a sensitive subject for gay men.
Form ossifies into genre through repetition.
Every Christmas, I cook an elaborate Mexican dinner.
Nothing is ever ideal. You have to work all the same.
A writer cannot be judged for his project, only its execution.
I love fiction's ability to allow me to inhabit a wholly different life.
I am not anti-Internet, and I don't think smart phones are a social ill.
I reject the notion that one should feel guilty about what you don't know.
You can't control what's going to happen to the book you're about to publish.
I work when I work, and that is often dictated by the things I cannot control.
Baking is a matter of precision and timing, but I just make things up as I go.
I don't have a Winslow Homer or a Renoir, but I do have the liberty to live as I like.
With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women.
Class is very, very fertile territory for American artists, and it has been for a long time.
Fashion has underscored the interchangeability of men for a long time, maybe from the outset.
Truly smart people and truly smart dressers share one thing in common: They make it look easy.
Children are weird. I was going to say 'most children,' but I think this a rare universal law.
I am a binge reader, with a tendency to throw myself at a writer, immerse myself in their work.
I work when I'm alone, but I have children and a family and a job, so alone time is at a premium.
If you can't empathize with other people, then you will never really be able to write well about them.
Shopping for clothes is time consuming, it's tiring, and it can feel like a waste of an autumn afternoon.
By a considerable margin, my family's largest-ever financial expenditure was the adoption of our two sons.
Some writers are prolific; some are shape-shifters. It's rare and intimidating to encounter one who is both.
It is true for my family and many others: Adoption has made us infinitely richer in the ways that matter most.
Usually, when you see clothes on a model, by some transitive property, that garment is imbued with her beauty.
That a friendship ends doesn't mean it was weak from the outset; that it ends says nothing about its importance.
It comforts the adult conscience to remember that, amid history's grave injustices, there were still great lives.
Parenting is love, sure, but it's as much about receiving love as it is giving it. Parenthood is a kind of vanity.
For a long time, I thought that I was an enlightened parent by virtue of being an enlightened person. What a fool.
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.
Summer is meant to be for travel, for exploration, for leisure, but sometimes budgets and schedules dictate otherwise.
Children's books deal in idealized worlds, so they're a document of how our notion of ideal worlds has changed over time.
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.
Children's literature - the product of adult guesswork - often fails to account for its audience's slippery grasp on the world.
Genre is a useful thing when organizing texts in a bookshop but immaterial to the particular exchange between writer and reader.
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.
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.
I think it's a not-uncommon experience for gay boys, young men, and even older men to spend a lot of time in the company of women.
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.
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 know I've had a charmed experience of being a parent, with healthy kids, a helpful partner, access to good day care, and great public schools.
Everyone on Twitter - everyone on the Internet - seems so damn certain. Brevity doesn't allow for nuance, and it's a nice complement to confidence.
If you've ever watched a television cartoon, you know that kids don't appreciate subtlety, though perhaps that's because they're not often offered it.
When I was somewhere between child and adult, my father left us. My first family broke apart, but this liberated me to create a new family as I pleased.
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.