You cannot have man legislating and playing God in Parliament, and at the same time believe that Allah is the only legislator.
What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.
If I actually ran the world, I'd do it from the kitchen. It's not anything deliberate or a statement or anything, that's just how I understand things. It's arranged along informal lines.
An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.
I write out of defiance.
The strange thing about my life is that I came to America at about the time when racial attitudes were changing. This was a big help to me. Also, the people who were most cruel to me when I first came to America were black Americans. They made absolute fun of the way I talked, the way I dressed. I couldn't dance. The people who were most kind and loving to me were white people. So what can one make of that? Perhaps it was a coincidence that all the people who found me strange were black and all the people who didn't were white.
I swim in a shaft of light, upside down, and I can see myself clearly, through and through, from every angle. Perhaps I stand on the brink of a great discovery.
These things. . . they are who you are. They brought you here. To this day. You didn't give me a chance to understand that ever the unattractive parts of you, the messy parts, were something I could accept.
Without David Bowie, popular music as we know it pretty much wouldn't exist.
Having a white parent undoubtedly makes for a different childhood experience than having two black parents.
I know hedge-fund guys that are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year and pay no tax. And I want to lower [tax] for the middle income. The middle class in this country has been decimated.