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.

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.

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.

When we had our first son, four different people gave us the same present: a copy of Ezra Jack Keats' 'The Snowy Day.' A new child often inspires duplicate gifts - we were given a dozen mostly useless baby blankets, just one more thing to spit up on - but this one was different.

It's my own personal hang-up, but I find adults who are picky eaters to be the worst. I don't mean food allergies or preferences: I mean picky eaters. We all know one, and they're impossible to go to lunch with or invite over for a dinner party.

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.

Contemporary families can be made in many ways. You might step up when relatives or friends are unable to meet their obligation to their children. You might marry someone who is already a parent. Or you might, as in my case, yearn to create a family and decide to adopt.

Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist.

Genre is a useful thing when organizing texts in a bookshop but immaterial to the particular exchange between writer and reader.

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.

Family is whatever you say it is.

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.

Fashion is about fantasy.

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

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.

For many writers, the endless performance of being a writer - tweeting, appearing, making the rounds - is required simply to attract enough attention to make a living.

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

Wishing there were more children's books like 'The Snowy Day' is a bit like wishing there were more grownup books like 'Anna Karenina.' There are only so many masterpieces out there.

It's not that a literature for children of color doesn't exist; it's that so much of the extant literature is lacking in the essential quality that makes literature for children so extraordinary a form: imagination.

Blackness, any sort of difference, is not a burden. Relegating blackness or other sorts of difference to serious books that explicitly engage with issues creates a context in which it can seem like one.

When you are young, it's deeply annoying to be told that certain things are a condition of your youth. There's almost always some condescension in the proposition that your reality, your hopes, your frustrations, are just a condition of your age, that what feels unique to you is a very common thing after all.

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.

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.

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'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.

We have all come from a woman in some fashion.

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

Vanity is a sensitive subject for gay men.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Baking is a matter of precision and timing, but I just make things up as I go.

When my husband and I first became parents, we joked that our chubby baby was destined to grow into an Alex P. Keaton Reaganite - the most unlikely, and therefore hilarious, course for the child of an interracial gay couple in gentrifying Brooklyn.

To be five years old is to be surprised by life. I'm amused by my children's awe at quotidian things - a toy helicopter, a bubble bath, the visible tentacles on a plate of calamari. And I'm envious of their ability to attain something I often can't: a state of transcendence induced by art.

Parenting advice is mostly useless because every family is uniquely its own; artistic advice is mostly useless because every artist works in their own way. Thus, figuring out how to balance the two has an intense specificity.

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.

Parenting is love, sure, but it's as much about receiving love as it is giving it. Parenthood is a kind of vanity.

Fiction is just lying.

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

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.

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.