Does it, does it—I'm flailing here—does it have a name? What you've

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.

God did not create you to be alone. He deposited skills, knowledge, and talents in someone out there who is expected to mentor you, teach you and encourage you to go high. Go, get a mentor!

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

Abortion is inherently different from other medical procedures because no other procedure involves the purposeful termination of a potential life.

Life is one, religion one, creeds are many and diverse.

No doubt the truth is hard to come by for those who do not like the sound of it - dreams and illusions are so much more pleasant.

As I get more confident as a filmmaker, I don't need to prepare so much in advance. I can trust that I and my team can come up with a solution.

Sink into morbid, cynical reflection on how much romantic heartbreak is to do with ego and miffed pride rather than actual loss

Although we are never glad when tragedy visits, we can be aware and seize the opportunity to do good in this world, even in the midst of tragedy.

It is an almost infallible rule that the more permissive a person is on social and moral issues the more in favour they are of strict gun control.

Robots want to love us because the field of artificial intelligence has programmed robots to say they want to love us.