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.
— Adam Mansbach
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 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.
You know you're a hopeless record nerd when your time travel fantasies always come around to how cool it would be to go back to 1973 and buy all the great funk and jazz and salsa records that came out that year on tiny obscure labels and are now really rare and expensive.
How do you sustain yourself when all the old structures people looked to for support - religion, family, ethnic solidarity - are crumbling, or feel so false that you refuse to avail yourself of them? What comes next?
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.
Children crave routine and find listening to the same stories over and over again soothing. If you've grown weary of the holiday books you've read your kid 7,883 times, try adding 'dude' to the end of every line of dialogue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My mother is really the person I learned to curse from. She discourages me from saying that in interviews. But it's true.
I like to read in the bathtub. Ideally, that bathtub would be located on a small Greek island.
When we talk about communities, we seldom discuss the margins. But for every person nestled comfortably in the bosom of a community, there is someone else on the outskirts, feeling ambivalent. Ambiguous. Excluded. Unwilling or unable to come more fully into the fold.
The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.
