Adam Mansbach Quotes

Adam Mansbach

Profession : Author

Birth : July 1, 1976

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.

Adam Mansbach

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

Adam Mansbach

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.

Adam Mansbach

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.

Adam Mansbach

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.

Adam Mansbach

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.

Adam Mansbach

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.

Adam Mansbach

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.

Adam Mansbach

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

Adam Mansbach

The paradox of being in an industry where other people are usually the gatekeepers: publishers, editors - there are a lot of barriers to having control over your career. But coming out of hip-hop, the mindset was always to create your own.

Adam Mansbach

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

Adam Mansbach

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.

Adam Mansbach

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.

Adam Mansbach

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

Adam Mansbach

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

Adam Mansbach

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.

Adam Mansbach

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

Adam Mansbach

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.

Adam Mansbach

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

Adam Mansbach

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.

Adam Mansbach