As a white teen, I was very drawn to hip-hop culture, almost to the point of disappearing in it - there was a sense of having no sense of authenticity except this one that wasn't mine.

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.

The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.

I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

Be a source of motivation wherever you are as a believer

Beauty you're born with, but brains you earn.

Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.

Our culture is getting better and better at encouraging women to speak, but it’s not doing enough to listen to what they say when they do.

I believe in 'Positives' not Negatives the only thing about Alcohol I'm Powerless over is those Damn Taxes

I learned then that practically no one in the world is entirely bad or entirely good, and that motives are often more important than actions.

Play is the state of mind that we can use in our creative process to our advantage.

I care not who controls a nation's political affairs, so long as I control her currency

The highest point outward things can bring unto, is the contentment of the mind; with which no estate can be poor, without which all estates will be miserable.

Beauty is fading, nor is fortune stable; sooner or later death comes to all.