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.

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.

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.

For any thinking person, it (perpetual happiness) is untenable. If you're a thinking person, your upbeat sometimes, said sometimes.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.

I'm a United States senator, and I have a responsibility to the people of my state - also to the people of this country.

Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them - and therefore by what quality of interaction they can inspire.

The outcome of the city will depend on the race between the automobile and the elevator, and anyone who bets on the elevator is crazy.

Romcoms are challenging, but I'm hungry for drama.

I'm not invited to any exciting parties and my life hasn't really changed.

Smoke that herb and clear your mind.

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.