There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

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.

Before I could turn to look up, a voice boomed from the heavens: "What the heck is going on down there?

O God give me enough grace for my daily work.

You won't know what "success" means if you don't appreciate what "hardwork" is.

I owe it all to Jesus.

You don’t have to be perfect to be pretty.

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

I've learned from doing my own show with Fox that people are not your partners if they're signing the checks. Whoever signs your paycheck is the boss - no matter what they tell you.

And people are moody, dude. You gotta get used to living with people.

We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back," he said. "I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.

What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.