Author

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.

In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels.

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.

There is a tendency to presume autobiography in fiction by women or minorities. Guys named Jonathan write universal stories, while there's this sense that everyone else is just fictionalizing their own small experiences.

I love fiction's ability to allow me to inhabit a wholly different life.

Class is very, very fertile territory for American artists, and it has been for a long time.

Summer is meant to be for travel, for exploration, for leisure, but sometimes budgets and schedules dictate otherwise.

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

I have a theory that because my kitchen is small, you can't preheat an oven and deal with dough at the same time, although maybe it's just that I'm a bad baker.

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.

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.

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.

Every sense has the power to transport us through time, but it's taste I find the most mysterious, and writing about it often results in tortured metaphors.

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

I work when I work, and that is often dictated by the things I cannot control.

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.

A writer cannot be judged for his project, only its execution.

Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist.

Nothing is ever ideal. You have to work all the same.

I've spent many hours of my life browsing in stores. At 21, I admired clothes I couldn't afford. At 30, I bought them. At 40, I sometimes go simply for the pleasure, of seeing what is new, of learning what counts as beautiful now.