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.

Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.

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

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

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.

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.

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.