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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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