Adam Mansbach Quotes

Fundamentally, I'm profoundly influenced by hip-hop, so whatever I do is going to bear that seal.

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

I like to read in the bathtub. Ideally, that bathtub would be located on a small Greek island.

To me, 'The End of the Jews' - both the title and the novel itself - is about the end of pat, uncritical ways of understanding oneself in the world.

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.

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.

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.

Ultimately, very few people parent their kids in ways that strike anybody else as reasoned, appropriate or sane.

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.

It's hilarious to me that by writing an obscene fake children's book I am mistaken for a parenting expert.

My approach is to treat writing very much as a job.

For many families, gift-giving is a major source of stress - the relentless commercialism, the whining demands, the financial pressure.

The trains were the beating heart of the New York graffiti scene.

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.

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

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.

I know you're not thirsty. That's bullshit. Stop lying. Lie the fuck down, my darling, and sleep.

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

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.

If you're a novelist, as I am in real life, you're usually so desperate for any kind of feedback.

I've always been really involved in figuring out who my audience is and how to reach them.

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.

Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.

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

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

As a writer, I've always been somebody who's been productive and hustled hard.

To capture sound is to isolate a moment, canonize it, enter it into the historical register.

My mother is really the person I learned to curse from. She discourages me from saying that in interviews. But it's true.

Eating is one of the great pleasures of life.

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.

Sometimes, it's best to let the kids take control - and it's never too early to instill positive eating habits or self-confidence in the kitchen.

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.

America has not produced a more salient political musician than Gil Scott-Heron.