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.

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

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

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.

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

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.