A risk is something that feels risky to the person who's taking it.

The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.

Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.

Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about.

In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre.

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.

I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.

What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still felt like a risk to me. So I chickened out.

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

Because I think people must be the same everywhere. Only these people are in my bones.

What goes on between a man and his missus is nobody's business

If you want to be successful, you must either have a chance or take one.

When I was very, very young - four, five, six - I could see inside people, their motives, their dreams, their apprehension of reality.

I think that any photographer is an investigator. Photography is a pretext to know the world, to know life. To know yourself.

Don't try to imitate other coaches. Be your own person with your own style and do your own thing.

There is only one Church, and the responsibility for missionary work is universal. 'Every member a missionary.'

She gets to school late. Bashful gives her a tardy, and won't reconsider. Janie always hated Bashful. Stupidest. Dwarf. Ever.

The president has very little effect on the economy. If you want to put blame or credit, the main person who influences the business cycle is the head of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Oh Lord, purify my soul from all its stains. Warm my heart with the love of thee, animate my sluggish nature and fix my inconstancy, and volatility, that I may not be weary in well doing.