I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

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.

Our purpose as believers is to make impact wherever we find ourselves

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

Lil Wayne is the best rapper on Earth. Can't nobody touch him. He's the only guy who can put out 300 songs a year and they all fire.

It is only before those who are glad to hear it, and anxious to spread it, that we find it easy to speak ill of others.

The gospel chargeth us with piety towards God, and justice and charity to men, and temperance and chastity in reference to ourselves.

Everybody is clever, just in their own ways

One goal of ethical inquiry might be to uncover strategies available for use when values conflict or when rules are incomplete.

People can be trained in certain principles, but then they actually have to apply them and try them out.

Angels and ministers of grace defend us.

The common growth of Mother Earth Suffices me,-her tears, her mirth, Her humblest mirth and tears.