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.

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.

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

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 politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.

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.