Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

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.

Explore the power of a beautiful wonder.

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.

Jesus loves me! This I know As He loved so long ago Taking children on His knee Saying, Let them come to Me.

Joy is a strength; intoxication, a weakness.

I'm going to cut taxes big league, and you're going to raise taxes big league, end of story.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

He has a brain like Einstein's - dead since 1955

Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them.

Language is our way of communicating what we want and who we are.

I believe we're making a mistake if we regard job creation and job safety as mutually exclusive or inherently in conflict; they can and they must go hand-in-hand.