Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.

Religion is not something I like to talk about publicly. One reason is the politics, but also I think spirituality is deeply personal.

We're all united in this, that every human being migrates through time, that the place we grew up in in our childhood is gone when we're in our 50s and 60s and 70s.

When we aren't collectively imagining hopeful futures, then the way things are going almost invariably seems negative and frightening.

In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

We keep the negative stuff because it's the negative stuff that's going to, you know, potentially kill us. That fin in the water - maybe it is a shark. That yellow thing behind the tree - maybe it is a lion. You need to be scared.