The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

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.

It is worth remembering that at some point in the very distant past, no human had ever drank milk from a cow.

It takes leadership to improve safety. And I started off the movement in my time, but the person who has done more over the past 20 to 30 years and who has led it is Professor Sid Watkins.

In another time I guess I would have been content with filming girls and cats. But you don’t choose your time.

I'm lucky, I guess. I only really need five or so hours of sleep.

People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.

Acting is just something I always knew I wanted to do - acting and writing.

The more you do, the more you fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better you get.

God owns all the wealth in the world!

Anushka Sharma is a dear friend; as is Jacqueline Fernandez. They always stand by me for support when it’s needed

I want to appreciate you without judging. Join you without invading. Invite you without demanding. Leave you without guilt.