I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

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.

When we give up the chase, we give up our wishing.

You ever get the feeling all hell’s about to break loose and there’s nothing you can do about it?

My love for Neo-Tokyo is a bulbous massof post-human organic circuitry.Cyperpunk is my mother tongue.My love is a man-machine interface gun.

I'm a character actor.

I really believe in the goodness of Canadians. The idea that everyone should be given an equal opportunity to succeed in this country and particularly for children.

I do endless chopping and preparing things. I really find that relaxing. I do a lot of thinking as I am chopping and cooking.

You see, my ambition was not to confound the engineering world but simply to create a beautiful piece of art.

As long as countries wave chequebooks over our heads, we can never be equal.

Good habits are as easy to form as bad ones.