Eating is one of the great pleasures of life.
Adam Mansbach
I like to read in the bathtub. Ideally, that bathtub would be located on a small Greek island.
To be a white kid into hip-hop meant you'd sought it out and you practiced the art. Which meant dedication and diligence, as well as removing yourself at least occasionally from your own comfort zone and circumstances, and from people who looked like you.
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.
The trains were the beating heart of the New York graffiti scene.
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.
Vinyl is democratic, as surely as the iPod is fascist. Vinyl is representational: It has a face. Two faces, in fact, to represent the dualism of human nature. Vinyl occupies physical space honestly, proud as a fat woman dancing.
One thing any DJ needs in his crate, especially at a barbecue, is a selection of 15-minute-plus jams.
My wife likes me to point out that she puts our daughter down to sleep more often than I do, which gives me time to write stupid books about it.
Because Jews were kicked out of every country in Europe at one time or another, and plenty of other places as well, there isn't an ability to identify with a national heritage - you'll never hear a Jew say 'I'm German' or 'I'm Polish,' without saying something about being Jewish as well, and for good reason.
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.
A holiday vacation can mean sampling all kinds of new cuisine - whether it's Uncle Joe's award-winning chili or the exotic flavors of Nepal. If your little ones are fussy, be sure to ease mealtime hassles by bringing along a supply of the familiar foods they're accustomed to rejecting at home.
Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.
Sleeping is one of the more private aspects of parenting; it happens in a quiet room, whereas eating is a more public aspect of parenting. Other people can see it and compare it to what their kids eat.
No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.
Fundamentally, I'm profoundly influenced by hip-hop, so whatever I do is going to bear that seal.
When it comes right down to it, developing a critical sensibility about parenting isn't really about disapproval; it's about honing your own sensibilities, figuring out how you want to parent.
For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty of writing takes place in the act of not writing. It's the procrastination, the thinking about writing that's difficult.
Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.
It's hilarious to me that by writing an obscene fake children's book I am mistaken for a parenting expert.
For me, graffiti writers were always the fascinating eccentrics of hip-hop culture. What they do is secretive by definition, and not remunerative in any way.
There is perhaps no better way to appreciate the dizzying stupidity of the United States than to chat with 25 consecutive morning radio hosts.
'The Pushcart War' is presented as a history of a conflict that has not yet taken place; in each edition of the book, the date on which the hostilities commenced is nudged forward.
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.
Of course, the opposite of white privilege is not blackness, as many of us seemed to think then; the opposite of white privilege is working to dismantle that privilege. But my particular hip-hop generation proved to be very serious about figuring it all out and staying engaged.
While I'm working, I stick with music that won't distract me - the dub stylings of Scientist and King Tubby, maybe some Beethoven string quartets.
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?
The goal has been not to get pigeonholed. I like working in different genres. I'm gonna try to be entertaining and funny and do my usual thing.
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.
I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there's this conflation of race, culture and religion.
My daughter is a very adventurous eater. I'm not the guy who sits around lamenting that all my kid will eat it is Tater Tots and chicken nuggets. With my kid, it's more a capricious and whimsical decision-making.
The genius of vinyl is that it allows - commands! - us to put our fingerprints all over that history: to blend and chop and reconfigure it, mock and muse upon it, backspin and skip through it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
My mother is really the person I learned to curse from. She discourages me from saying that in interviews. But it's true.
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.
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.
For many families, gift-giving is a major source of stress - the relentless commercialism, the whining demands, the financial pressure.
In theory, parents are supposed to empathize with one other - find common cause in the fervent desire to preserve and protect the world for the next generation, and connect on some deep, almost mystical level that those poor souls who have not experienced this kind of all-consuming love cannot possibly comprehend.
Ultimately, very few people parent their kids in ways that strike anybody else as reasoned, appropriate or sane.
The publishing industry stopped having new ideas out of respect for the untimely death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961 and has been doing everything the same way ever since.
To capture sound is to isolate a moment, canonize it, enter it into the historical register.
Look closely, and you can see where the grooves of a record widen, indicating a sparseness that can only be a bass solo, or grow denser to accommodate a cresting density of sound.
The paradox of being in an industry where other people are usually the gatekeepers: publishers, editors - there are a lot of barriers to having control over your career. But coming out of hip-hop, the mindset was always to create your own.
I've planned book tours for myself, whether or not anybody wants to hear what I have to say. I've weighed in on things like what the cover looks like, what the copy looks like, how it's going to be promoted - just every aspect of it.
