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.

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.

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.

There's more women likes to be loved than there is of those that loves.

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

If you look close enough, you can see cracks in everything. And that's okay. Because when you really think about it, it's the cracks and gaps and chinks in things that let the light shine in.

Indeed, it is not intellect, but intuition which advances humanity. Intuition tells man his purpose in this life.

We are the sum of our actions, and therefore our habits make all the difference.

[Barack] Obama is in incompetent, as a president, he's about as bad as it gets.

When a person’s tongue is extensively wrong, it is absurd, no less than unscriptural, to say that their heart is right.

What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.

We're talking about a world where the PC is no longer the center, but just a devicewhere your new devices need to be more portable, more personal.