Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has appeared on 60 Minutes, in an interview with Steve Kroft, on the eve of the publication of his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir.

Here are a few excerpts of the interview which remind us that there is a vast difference between a public perception of an individual and the individual himself, something which Justice Thomas has experienced and discusses with candor. Regarding how he is viewed, he says:

“It’s fascinating that people, there’s so many people now who will make judgments based on what you look like,” Thomas says. “I’m black. So I’m supposed to think a certain way. I’m supposed to have certain opinions. I don’t do that. You don’t create a box and put people in and then make a lot of generalizations about them.”

The justice agrees that there are some misconceptions about him, but says, “I think there are misconceptions about all of us.”

“There’s been an effort over the last 15, 20 years to create this perception of me. And you can’t argue that that’s been, in large part, successful,” Thomas says.

He is often dismissed as a man of little accomplishment, an opportunistic black conservative who sold out his race, joined the Republican Party and was ultimately rewarded with an affirmative action appointment to the nation’s highest court, a sullen, intellectual lightweight so insecure he rarely opens his mouth in oral arguments. The problem with the characterization is that it’s unfair and untrue.

“These conceptions or misperceptions, you call them, have accumulated because you haven’t really addressed them. You haven’t talked about them,” Kroft remarks.

“My job is to write opinions. I decide cases and write opinions. It is not to respond to idiocy and critics who make statements that are unfounded,” Thomas says. “That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t have constructive criticisms, but it should be constructive. Whether or not I’m black or not, that’s just silliness. That is not worth responding to.”

Of the grandfather, who shaped and influence his life, he says:

“My mother packed our bags, told us we were to our grandparents’ house a few blocks away,” he remembers.

When he got to the front door he was met by his grandfather, Myers Anderson, a barely literate but frugal and industrious man who owned a truck and eked out a modest existence delivering fuel oil and firewood. He was a towering presence, who still looms over Thomas’s life.

“Do you remember the first things your grandfather said to you?” Kroft asks.

“He said the damn vacation is over,” Thomas recalls. “And he meant it. And there would be rules and regulations.”

“Some of the rules were that my grandmother was always right. That meant him too,” Thomas remembers. “And he would say, ‘Old Man Can’t is dead. I helped bury him.’ I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that. He felt very, very strongly that nothing was impossible.”

Thomas says his grandfather was the greatest man he ever met, and in tribute named his memoir “My Grandfather’s Son.” But he didn’t necessarily think so when he was growing up. His life was consumed by endless chores and regular duty on his grandfather’s delivery truck. Summer vacations were spent working a plot of land that had been deeded to his ancestors after the Civil War, just across the road from the plantation where they had worked as slaves. He and his brother helped build a house, cleared land, picked crops and learned under his grandfather’s tutelage that blisters turn to calluses and plantings into harvests.

Curious readers and viewers want to know what he has to say about Anita Hill, his former employee at the EEOC, in the aftermath, years later of the Senate Judiciary confirmation hearings in which she accused him of sexual harassment.

Asked if the Anita Hill that testified was the same Anita Hill he knew at the EEOC, Thomas says, “She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed. That’s not the person I knew. ”

“Who’s the person you knew?” Kroft asks.

“Well, I think she could defend herself. Let’s just put it that way. And she did not take slights very kindly. And anyone who did anything, she responded very quickly,” Thomas says.

“Didn’t take ten years?” Kroft asks.

“It didn’t take ten minutes,” Thomas says.

In the book, he remembers her as an average employee whose behavior could sometimes be irritating, rude, and unprofessional, which he attributed to her youth. He was asked to write a number of recommendations for her and helped advance her career, and speculates that she was swept up in events and succumbed to a combination of ego, ambition and immaturity.

Regarding his own testimony at the hearings:

“This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace,” he said during the hearing. “It is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

“Why did you use that language? Why a high tech lynching?” Kroft asks.

“If someone just wantonly tries to destroy you, if somebody comes in and drags you out of your house and beats the hell out of you. What is it?” the justice replies.

“What do you want people to think about these allegations? What is important…,” Kroft asks.

“I think most well-meaning people understand it for what it was. It was a weapon to destroy me, clear and simple,” Thomas says.

Read the rest of the transcript, or watch the video.