THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS

There can be no dragon slayer in the absence of dragons.

I do think that some form of reparations for the descendants of American slavery would go a long way.

Jacques Audiard has always been an outlier in a French film industry that is starkly bifurcated between high and low.

There are few things more American than falling back on the language of race when what we're really talking about is class or, more accurate still, manners, values and taste.

A couple of years ago, leaving a restaurant near the Louvre, I held the door for a black man in a camel overcoat. Only as he passed did I realize it was the rapper Kanye West.

The French, whose fascination with 19th-century Japanese painting and decorative art led them to coin the term 'Japonisme,' have reciprocated the interest, and the exchange - in food, fashion and design - is ongoing. After all, these are two countries where style is considered essential to life.

It is fun, I learned, to stroll around with Spike Lee and to gauge other people's reactions. Everyone recognizes him.

Doubtless, reading good books benefited me during the months and years of writing, yet I remained skeptical of any tight correlation to what I produced. That was naive.

I love being a foreigner.

A lot of people say there's no such thing as cancel culture and then you name an example and they're, like, 'That person deserved it,' so then there is cancel culture, but it works in its accountability.

The idea that a person can be both black and white - and at the same time neither - is novel in America.

As we all know, the evil of slavery and the sting of the whip have given us many things including the voice of Nina Simone, the prose of James Baldwin, the Air Jordan sneaker, the blues, jazz, moonwalking, and more recently gangsta rap.

I am not immune to Oprah's charms, but President Winfrey is a terrible idea.

Paris has long been a palimpsest of different cities, each new iteration grafted on top of the still visible last, spanning the extremes of human excellence and beauty and, just as crucially, filth and squalor.

My family matters most to me, even though so much of our daily lives and commitments make it so difficult to be as present with those you love as you might wish.

If white people on a larger scale really de-emphasized their whiteness, I think that would have to transform the Republican party into a more responsible party that couldn't get by on just playing into white resentment, especially white middle and working class resentment while taking care of the interests of plutocrats.

Being fired for bad performance or for having an alter ego that posts incredibly racist stuff is not cancel culture.

I think I was drawn to black culture by the same things that have been drawing the entire world to it since the days of Richard Wright, Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong. This culture is original, potent and seductive.

We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the Internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges's 'Aleph.'

The ideal post-Trump politician will, at the very least, be a deeply serious figure with a strong record of public service behind her.

If the idea of separate human races is a mistake to begin with, then monoracial forms of identification are fictitious and counterproductive.

A map of Trump country would look a lot like a map of the various regions and counties from which young people with the best opportunities have consistently chosen to flee.

I think that unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn't real, race isn't real.

I've been socially deemed black in America, and this is a category that's been hurting my family for generations and that has also led to extraordinary cultural contributions that I'm very proud of, but it's not a real category and our society is damaged by insisting on it.

There were books all over the house, and I was always told that I could write and that it was something good to do. So when I finally did it, it wasn't so strange or bizarre.