Adam Mansbach Quotes
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I came up in hip-hop, where people value the ability to tell it straight.
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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.
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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.
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No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.
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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.
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Eating is one of the great pleasures of life.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there's this conflation of race, culture and religion.
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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.
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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.
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Fundamentally, I'm profoundly influenced by hip-hop, so whatever I do is going to bear that seal.
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Religious traditions are easy to lose sight of in today's marketing frenzy. Make sure you take time to gently usher your little ones into the rituals that have special meaning for you.
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The city fought a $300 million, 18-year war on graffiti. New York Mayor John Lindsay declared war in 1972, and the battle for the transit system came later.
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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.
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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.
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Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.
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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.
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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.
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Ultimately, very few people parent their kids in ways that strike anybody else as reasoned, appropriate or sane.
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It's hilarious to me that by writing an obscene fake children's book I am mistaken for a parenting expert.