I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

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.

You must understand that all great things come through time conversion.

The prayer from the heart is a great power.

Even the disciples, who at times could be dense as bricks, realized that the true neighbor was the one who showed mercy to a stranger.

Worry is most often a prideful way of thinking that you have more control over life and its circumstances than you actually do.

Hot water makes stress, makes you embarrassed… cold makes you to refresh, calm, relax… but mainly dead people are cold and the alive are hotter.

If Heaven made him earth can find some use for him.

In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.

The prosperous man does not know whether he is loved.

Meanings is not important, said the BFG. I cannot be right all the time. Quite often I is left instead of right.

You can name your own salary in this business. I call mine Fred.