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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.