Summer is meant to be for travel, for exploration, for leisure, but sometimes budgets and schedules dictate otherwise.

Checking your phone during dinner is no less rude than reading 'People' during dinner, which I once saw a woman do at Blue Ribbon Brooklyn as she dined with her husband/boyfriend/whatever.

Shot glasses make me think of youth and a mode of drinking and living that was never mine, even when I was the age for it.

Shopping for clothes is time consuming, it's tiring, and it can feel like a waste of an autumn afternoon.

Writing takes gall. I like to think that's true even for writers with several books under their belt, writers who have been doing it for years. It takes something - guts, gumption, self-delusion - to ask for a reader's time when we all know there's nothing new under the sun; that it's all been said, or written, before.

I don't have a Winslow Homer or a Renoir, but I do have the liberty to live as I like.

Truly smart people and truly smart dressers share one thing in common: They make it look easy.

Because the designers at Baby Gap and Crew Cuts have determined it would be cute if kids dressed like their dads, seemingly every American male between 2 and 52 dresses identically.

Children's picture books are a unique record of social evolution: in gender roles and racial politics, as is much discussed, but also in fashion and interior design.

By a considerable margin, my family's largest-ever financial expenditure was the adoption of our two sons.

I am a binge reader, with a tendency to throw myself at a writer, immerse myself in their work.

Instead of a passion for the Yankees or fly-fishing or birding, I want to pass on to my sons a love of books, music, and art. I accept that this is partly about the gratification of my own ego, but it's also one of the only ways I know of making a rich life. That's what we all want for our progeny.

Writer's block is a fiction.

I didn't know, at 22, that everything that happens to you, the good stuff as well as the less-good stuff, accrues and becomes your life.

I don't want the staggeringly wealthy Elton John and his family to represent the standard of gay fatherhood any more than straight people want the stunningly beautiful Angelina Jolie and her family to represent the standard of heterosexual parenthood. Stars are outliers; stars are exceptions.

With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women.

That a friendship ends doesn't mean it was weak from the outset; that it ends says nothing about its importance.

Does a bona fide chimichurri have cilantro in it? Who cares? Cooking for your family, unless your family includes Joel Rubouchon, is liberating in that regard.

Time is a finite resource.

Is deciding what you like an instinct, a sense that arrives as swiftly as my autoimmune response to cat dander? Or is it the result of reasoned consideration, the way wine tasters swish pinot noir around in their mouths, spit it out, and reach for complex metaphors about chocolate and tobacco?

Fashion has underscored the interchangeability of men for a long time, maybe from the outset.

I have a theory that because my kitchen is small, you can't preheat an oven and deal with dough at the same time, although maybe it's just that I'm a bad baker.

Subtlety doesn't work with kids.

Children's books deal in idealized worlds, so they're a document of how our notion of ideal worlds has changed over time.

Every sense has the power to transport us through time, but it's taste I find the most mysterious, and writing about it often results in tortured metaphors.

For a long time, I thought that I was an enlightened parent by virtue of being an enlightened person. What a fool.

I think it's a not-uncommon experience for gay boys, young men, and even older men to spend a lot of time in the company of women.

History is a story like any other, but black history is a story so devoid of logic that it frustrates the young reader. The young readers in my house, told of slavery and segregation, asked in disbelief, 'What? Why?' We - the parents of black children, the parents of all children - still need to tell that story.

It comforts the adult conscience to remember that, amid history's grave injustices, there were still great lives.

If writing really is empathy, then understanding your place in society might actually help you achieve it.

Form ossifies into genre through repetition.

One of the many American ideals that make no sense at all is that we're all a million rugged individualists marching in lockstep. We dress accordingly, at least the men. If it's always been thus, I yearn for the halcyon days of the man in the gray flannel suit because at least that guy had some flair.

I know I've had a charmed experience of being a parent, with healthy kids, a helpful partner, access to good day care, and great public schools.

Among this country's enduring myths is that success is virtuous, while the wealth by which we measure success is incidental. We tell ourselves that money cannot buy happiness, but what is incontrovertible is that money buys stuff, and if stuff makes you happy, well, complete the syllogism.

Every Christmas, I cook an elaborate Mexican dinner.

Children are weird. I was going to say 'most children,' but I think this a rare universal law.

I mourn for the kind of dad I didn't have; I rue my first broken family while taking joy in the one that I've made.

It is true for my family and many others: Adoption has made us infinitely richer in the ways that matter most.

Lindsay Hatton's novel 'Monterey Bay' so beautifully evokes the landscape of the titular locale, you'll feel transported to Northern California even if you're reading it on the bus on your morning commute.

In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels.

Everyone on Twitter - everyone on the Internet - seems so damn certain. Brevity doesn't allow for nuance, and it's a nice complement to confidence.

I didn't know, at 22, that regret is useless. If I could go back and change something - give myself some big break, pass along some secret information, reassure myself that most things would, in fact, work out - I don't think I would.

Class is very, very fertile territory for American artists, and it has been for a long time.

Men's fashion's tendency toward uniformity promises little fun, but at least it offers this: If I wear sweatpants and sneakers, I can pass as the American it's safest to be.

I married the man I love when the state of California said I could. We made a family through adoption, as New York State said we could. From the outside, our family - two dads, two sons via adoption - seems like an experiment, but what family isn't an experiment?

I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It's such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can't think too deeply about that when I'm working, or I'd never get anything down on the page.

The person most qualified to tell the tale of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the man himself, as gifted an intellect as he is an athlete.

I grew up in the D.C. suburbs, and what I like about that place is that there's not a strong regional affect in the cultural imagination like there is in Dallas or San Francisco or New York City. You have a little more freedom as a novelist this way. The suburbs become a generic idea, and the place doesn't intrude into the narrative.

When I look at the list of my favorite works, writers who are women do tend to outnumber writers who are men for whatever reason.

I've spent many hours of my life browsing in stores. At 21, I admired clothes I couldn't afford. At 30, I bought them. At 40, I sometimes go simply for the pleasure, of seeing what is new, of learning what counts as beautiful now.