A biography for Rumaan Alamhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I didn't know, at 22, that everything that happens to you, the good stuff as well as the less-good stuff, accrues and becomes your life.”
“Form ossifies into genre through repetition.”
“Does a bona fide chimichurri have cilantro in it? Who cares? Cooking for your family, unless your family includes Joel Rubouchon, is liberating in that regard.”
“There are probably some readers who don't want a great American writer to acknowledge that cleaning out the bottom drawer of the refrigerator has ever crossed their mind.”
“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.”
“I work when I'm alone, but I have children and a family and a job, so alone time is at a premium.”
“Fashion has underscored the interchangeability of men for a long time, maybe from the outset.”
“Genre is a useful thing when organizing texts in a bookshop but immaterial to the particular exchange between writer and reader.”
“Children's literature - the product of adult guesswork - often fails to account for its audience's slippery grasp on the world.”
“Class is very, very fertile territory for American artists, and it has been for a long time.”
“There is a tendency to presume autobiography in fiction by women or minorities. Guys named Jonathan write universal stories, while there's this sense that everyone else is just fictionalizing their own small experiences.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 am not anti-Internet, and I don't think smart phones are a social ill.”
“Obama-as-dad is my favorite Obama. Obama-as-executive, with his stubborn faith in reasonableness in times absent of reason, presided over the country during its descent into madness. I find it a comfort that Obama-as-dad presided over a family that leaves the White House healthy and happy.”
“It comforts the adult conscience to remember that, amid history's grave injustices, there were still great lives.”