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.

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.

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

The bigness of the West makes men quiet

The way to stay popular as a quarterback in the NFL is never to play.

Stay present. You'll always have time to worry later on if you want to.

I know you'll never love me like you used to.

The sky outside the window was changing rapidly from deep, velvety blue to cold, steely gray and then, slowly, to pink shot with gold.

Attending church is one thing, belonging is another.

Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world, and ignorance of mankind.

Good birth is a fine thing, but the merit is our ancestors.

I ended up writing songs by taking stock of all the different events in my life, but all those songs were bad.

Goal setting will never stop. I will continue to work hard and practice hard and see where things go.