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.

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

We create things to watch them grow, Ruin, she said. To take pleasure in seeing that which we love become more than it was before.

Today, take a pledge to love yourself. Do not cut, drown, get caught in the fire, or hang yourself. Reasons behind committing suicide can be cured!

I don't want to force my mind to love someone else or adjust with someone whom Inever can give my true love. #Life Of Love - Film

We win some, we lose some, but there is always some.

Personally, I really enjoy sci-fi. I watch it, I read comic books, and I play video games. I love this kind of world, so too be able to work in it is a dream. I enjoy it.

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

You can quit anything on a Thursday.

I've always like the time before dawn because there's no one around to remind me who I'm supposed to be, so it's easier to remember who I am.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

I feel like jeans and a T-shirt have become Establishment. Everyone’s dressed down. So actually putting on a jacket is the anti-­Establishment stance.