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.

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.

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

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'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.

Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.