The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.

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.

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.

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.