As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I thought I wanted.

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.

How Gloomy it is, to pause, to cease and to rust unburn, to get used and be indistinct. Like to live is to breathe.

Fearlessly use the power of your will & determination to go forth in life, strengthened.

My dad died of a stroke.

But I love how people who are musical, they know how to dress.

It takes a lot of courage to be the same person on the outside that you are on the inside.

Racing Stripes was so much fun to do. It's one of the funniest movies I've seen in a couple years.

What's kind of weird is that when I'm writing I don't know where I'm going to go.

Your medium has to be alive to you, no matter what you do.

The Soul of each one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete.

Women's right-to-know laws are supported by the overwhelming majority, not just of men, but of women, and 70% of the American people favor bans on abortion after the 20th week late term abortions.