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 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.

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.

There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.