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

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.

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.

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

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

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.