“Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.”

“Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.”

“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.”

“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.”

“How do you sustain yourself when all the old structures people looked to for support - religion, family, ethnic solidarity - are crumbling, or feel so false that you refuse to avail yourself of them? What comes next?”

“Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.”

“Vinyl is democratic, as surely as the iPod is fascist. Vinyl is representational: It has a face. Two faces, in fact, to represent the dualism of human nature. Vinyl occupies physical space honestly, proud as a fat woman dancing.”

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

“Sleeping is one of the more private aspects of parenting; it happens in a quiet room, whereas eating is a more public aspect of parenting. Other people can see it and compare it to what their kids eat.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”