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

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

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.

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.

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 never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

My parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area.