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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.