Quotes from Adam Mansbach

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.

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.

I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there's this conflation of race, culture and religion.

There is perhaps no better way to appreciate the dizzying stupidity of the United States than to chat with 25 consecutive morning radio hosts.

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.

No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.

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.

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.

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.

One thing any DJ needs in his crate, especially at a barbecue, is a selection of 15-minute-plus jams.

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.

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.

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.

I came up in hip-hop, where people value the ability to tell it straight.

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.

When I'm writing, I'm in an isolation chamber. I'm not one to think about that outside world stuff when I'm writing.

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.

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.