111 Quotes by Rumaan Alam

I know I've had a charmed experience of being a parent, with healthy kids, a helpful partner, access to good day care, and great public schools.

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.

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.

Form ossifies into genre through repetition.

One of the many American ideals that make no sense at all is that we're all a million rugged individualists marching in lockstep. We dress accordingly, at least the men. If it's always been thus, I yearn for the halcyon days of the man in the gray flannel suit because at least that guy had some flair.

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.

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.

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 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.