Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

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.

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.

I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth.

One cannot worship the false god of nationalism and the God of Christianity at the same time. .

If I die... I'd be so mad at myself that I didn't explore that side of me.

I can't save them by myself, oh but God forbid that I just turn my head and walk on by. Don't let me be a stranger to those less fortunate than I.

Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church.

My mom says I have to be more positive, and I say life has to be more positive too or it's just not going to work.

We make my opponent out as a monster. We focus on his strengths because that's what we need to negate.

Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us.

Until the day comes when the senseless killing ends, we will all have to fight like wildlife warriors to protect our precious planet.

Long live the rose that grew from the concrete when no one else ever cared!