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.

Shopping for clothes is time consuming, it's tiring, and it can feel like a waste of an autumn afternoon.

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.

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

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

Because the designers at Baby Gap and Crew Cuts have determined it would be cute if kids dressed like their dads, seemingly every American male between 2 and 52 dresses identically.

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.

By a considerable margin, my family's largest-ever financial expenditure was the adoption of our two sons.

I am a binge reader, with a tendency to throw myself at a writer, immerse myself in their work.

Instead of a passion for the Yankees or fly-fishing or birding, I want to pass on to my sons a love of books, music, and art. I accept that this is partly about the gratification of my own ego, but it's also one of the only ways I know of making a rich life. That's what we all want for our progeny.

Writer's block is a fiction.

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.

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.

With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women.

That a friendship ends doesn't mean it was weak from the outset; that it ends says nothing about its importance.

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.

Time is a finite resource.