Rumaan Alam

“I'm not black myself, but my sons are.”

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

“Men's fashion's tendency toward uniformity promises little fun, but at least it offers this: If I wear sweatpants and sneakers, I can pass as the American it's safest to be.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I love fiction's ability to allow me to inhabit a wholly different life.”

“I don't have a Winslow Homer or a Renoir, but I do have the liberty to live as I like.”

“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.”

“My husband and I adopted our children through a private agency, Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children. As a nonprofit organization, it relies on client fees as well as donor support to do its work.”

“Fashion is about fantasy.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“It is true for my family and many others: Adoption has made us infinitely richer in the ways that matter most.”

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

“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.”

“Every Christmas, I cook an elaborate Mexican dinner.”