Home is the place where there is somebody who does not wish you any pain.

Being a liberal progressive has been demonized as anti-white or overly on the side of blacks. There's nothing that can be done about that; it's just where we are in the history of our perceptions.

It's not nothing when you're abroad and you don't have a washing machine.

The hardest thing about Berlin is letting it belong to other people.

In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.

As for the not-black black president issue - white people can imagine blacks worse off than them, no problem. And now they can imagine blacks better off, no problem. But they still can't imagine black people who are just like them. That's the real problem. That's racism. Not being able to believe that those others are actually just like you.

The point of Berlin was that it seemed that only people like you ran the city. You never ran into people who weren't like you - especially when you lived as that kind of American in Berlin connected to the arts.