Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

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.

I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.

A hard core life I toast to ex flaw, therefore I live raw and went to war wit the law.

I think you can use fiction to get inside people's minds.

I used to play one job and have 125 pair of shoes on the floor. What was I doing? I couldn't wear but one pair.

The opposite of a glance... is a glimpse: because in a glance, we see only for a second, and in a glimpse, the object shows itself only for a second.

I was looking through a newspaper and it was an audition for 'Kids Say the Darndest Things,' so I tried out. One thing led to another and I appeared on 'The Rosie O'Donnell Show' and 'Oprah.

At the centre of every fairy tale lay a truth that gave the story its power

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

The passive receiving of Christ is the process by which a spiritual principle of grace is generated in the will of man.

My grandmother, grandfather, my mom - we've always been driven by laughter. It's what held us together. Thanksgivings, any kind of family get-together, we usually end up in tears.