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.

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

Some way some how i'm going to be happy i'm going to laugh i'm going to prosper, i feel good that i remain positive thru these mess up times!!!

Doing good things for bad people is no different than doing bad things on good people.

A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.

It's cold water in the face to realize you're not nearly as special and as unusual as you might have thought when you were an alienated teenager.

You have different sorts of people in life, so why should it be any different in football?

there is no aristocracy of grief. Grief is a great leveler.

What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one.

The other saxophones, except as solo instruments, really don't have much point in the orchestra

Love grants in a moment What toil can hardly achieve in an age. [Ger., In einem Augenblick gewahrt die Liebe Was Muhe kaum in langer Zeit erreicht.]

I'm respected, I'm still working, what more could I ask?