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

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

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.

The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.

There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.

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

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.