Children's literature - the product of adult guesswork - often fails to account for its audience's slippery grasp on the world.
With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women.
Vanity is a sensitive subject for gay men.
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.
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.
Writer's block is a fiction.
Summer is meant to be for travel, for exploration, for leisure, but sometimes budgets and schedules dictate otherwise.
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.
Fiction is just lying.
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.
I think it's a not-uncommon experience for gay boys, young men, and even older men to spend a lot of time in the company of women.
Time is a finite resource.
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.
