Zitat des Tages von Adam Mansbach:
I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there's this conflation of race, culture and religion.
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.
If anything, I was a prodigious eater of everything that was put in front of me. That was probably the only thing my parents wouldn't complain about.
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.
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.
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.
My approach is to treat writing very much as a job.
When the kid goes to bed, you get a little bit of time for yourself and maybe your partner, so being delayed in that departure can be particularly frustrating.
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.
For many families, gift-giving is a major source of stress - the relentless commercialism, the whining demands, the financial pressure.
Fundamentally, I'm profoundly influenced by hip-hop, so whatever I do is going to bear that seal.
Eating is one of the great pleasures of life.
I've always been really involved in figuring out who my audience is and how to reach them.
I came up in hip-hop, where people value the ability to tell it straight.
A good cookout ought to last at least six hours; if you haven't eaten and gotten full and gotten hungry and eaten again, you're doing something wrong.
I try to write in the mornings, as soon as I'm up and caffeinated, and to stay in the chair as long as I can be productive.
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.
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.
Ultimately, very few people parent their kids in ways that strike anybody else as reasoned, appropriate or sane.
One thing any DJ needs in his crate, especially at a barbecue, is a selection of 15-minute-plus jams.
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.
Being Jewish is a big part of my artistic sensibility and my humor... I think it gives me a certain take on the world on a literary level.
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.
If you're a novelist, as I am in real life, you're usually so desperate for any kind of feedback.
'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.
I was a rapper and a DJ, and if you wanted to be involved in hip-hop, you had to be involved in the sonic, the kinetic and the visual aspects. The visual was graffiti.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would like to think that I curse expertly - it's not something that I do without considering it. I never curse without intending to; it's not something I resort to because of inability to articulate or find the correct word.
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 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 probably done more than a thousand interviews, and I can't remember what people asked me two months ago or two days ago.
