The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

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.

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

You don’t have to be happy to smile.

Quiet love is better than loud hate.

I believe that there is a bipartisan consensus to have individual mandates.

Excitement radiates through your eyes, your face, your voice, your soul, and your whole personality.

If you encounter someone who pronounces the t in often, odds are they're a douchebag.

People are shaped by friendship as much as by romance.

The magic of procedure: do this after that and thus before so; then your wish will be granted.

Men put me on a pedestal, then never come to visit.

Every child should try everything: sport, music, art, mathematics; they can do it all. Copying and competition are now seen as twin evils, but they are both useful tools.

Thought depends absolutely on the stomach, but in spite of that, those who have the best stomachs are not the best thinkers.