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

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.

Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.

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.

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

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

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.