For me, success is when I'm making a contribution and fully engaging all of my talents. In terms of the key quality, it's being willing to continue to believe in yourself even when other people don't, and being able to fail and to come back.

I learned that you can't write a book in the margins of your life. I'd forgotten how much uninterrupted time it takes to write chapters, and how you have to push everything else aside and really focus.

While the establishment Republican candidates are busy doing this, attacking each other, and doing everything they can to bring each other down, they seem to be missing the bull`s-eye. They`re missing the targets.

The land on which they (the Founding Fathers) formed this Union was stolen. The hands with which they built this nation were enslaved. The women who birthed the citizens of the nation are second class. This is the imperfect fabric of our nation, at times we’ve torn and stained it, and at other moments, we mend and repair it. But it’s ours, all of it. The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us.

I think the idea that you're somehow rejecting whiteness if you don't identify yourself as biracial is odd because everybody engages in whiteness. If you live in America, you're doing whiteness all the time, even if you have no white people in your family.

I do feel like there`s this Republican Party establishment is in disarray. That`s the story that the Donald Trump surge seems to tell.

The problem is that many of our policymakers want to base sweeping laws on those feelings.