Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.

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.

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.

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

What if?..What if I am all to see?What if life is only this? And Ignorance is bliss?What if love is only pain? And nothing can be gained by living everydayAnd there is no better way?What then?

being different can work for the individual who are comfortable with themselves, and most importantly work hard to achieve greatness.

The only thing worst than being hurt is everyone knowing that yoou're hurt.

Great companies are built on great products.

Strengthen an adversary led by a dictator who dreams of reassembling the old Soviet empire? What an extraordinarily dangerous lack of judgment.

Use career to develop yourself. Have fun with it. Dedicate your activities and your career, to eternity, and to enlightenment.

If Iran obtains nuclear weapons, then almost certainly Saudi Arabia will do the same, as will Egypt, Turkey and perhaps others in the region.

The road to freedom is a difficult, hard road. It always makes for temporary setbacks.

Always when I come to the field, I try to do my best for other people.

To be merry best becomes you; for, out of question, you were born in a merry hour.