I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.

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.

This world is as loving as much as you love this world.

It takes a good leader, with integrity, to enhance a leader with passion.

Dogs are actually very smart, it's just that they're rather clumsy, but it's this trait that makes humans attracted to them and why I love dogs so much.

The difference between ordinary and extra-ordinary is so often just simply that little word - extra.

The great coming to age of cable is really a beautiful thing. No commercials. It's like a small theater. It's a cinema on a TV screen.

They tire of quiet, that have known the storm

None but God is loved in the exist- ent things. It is He who is manifest within every beloved to the eye of every lover – and there is nothing in the existent realm that is not a lover

But love isn't quantifiable on paper.

A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.

My dad was a businessman, and he would say, 'Work for free at the best company. Don't get paid a lot of money to work with the worst people.' And that's exactly how I see my career.