I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music."