Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.

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.

Once you discover freedom, you want to capture it, never let it go.

I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

We need to empower every single child no matter who you are, no matter where you come from to have the best education and the best future.

It’s the glitches and twists, I thought, that make this universe unique and compelling. Without flaws, there would be no depth, no substance.

I didn't moisturise when I was younger, but when I got to 27 I decided to start slathering myself in oil, and now I'm obsessed with moisturising.

I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself

This is not a trial. This is a lynching. There is no law.

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void.

Spiritual strength frequently comes through selfless service.