Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Rumaan Alam - Page 2

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

We have all come from a woman in some fashion.

I work when I work, and that is often dictated by the things I cannot control.

I am not anti-Internet, and I don't think smart phones are a social ill.

Kids are the ultimate trump card: a way to get out of co-op board meetings or lunch with a friend you don't want to see or your brother-in-law's set at a comedy club. It's fair to use your kids as an excuse to sidestep what you don't want to do; it's less fair to blame them for not being able to achieve what you do want to do.

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

When you are what we call a 'minority writer,' a writer of color, a writer of any kind of difference, there is some kind of presumption of autobiography in everything you produce. And I find that really maddening, and I resist that.

This tension between ambition and parenthood, that's not a reckoning that many men face. There are plenty of men who say, 'Oh, I need to be there for my kids, and I can't do x or y professionally,' but for the most part, that's a struggle that belongs to women in society.

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.

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

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.

Subtlety doesn't work with kids.

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.

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

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.

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.

Time is a finite resource.

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

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.

Vanity is a sensitive subject for gay men.

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.

The cultural conversation around privilege has grown vibrant enough that the ultimate privilege is to just ignore it altogether. Some decry this conversation as pernicious. I don't agree.

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

Truly smart people and truly smart dressers share one thing in common: They make it look easy.

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

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?

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 reject the notion that one should feel guilty about what you don't know.

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.

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

Writer's block is a fiction.

You can't control what's going to happen to the book you're about to publish.

Children's literature - the product of adult guesswork - often fails to account for its audience's slippery grasp on the world.

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.

Checking your phone during dinner is no less rude than reading 'People' during dinner, which I once saw a woman do at Blue Ribbon Brooklyn as she dined with her husband/boyfriend/whatever.

I grew up in the D.C. suburbs, and what I like about that place is that there's not a strong regional affect in the cultural imagination like there is in Dallas or San Francisco or New York City. You have a little more freedom as a novelist this way. The suburbs become a generic idea, and the place doesn't intrude into the narrative.

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.

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.

Fiction is just lying.

Lindsay Hatton's novel 'Monterey Bay' so beautifully evokes the landscape of the titular locale, you'll feel transported to Northern California even if you're reading it on the bus on your morning commute.