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

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.

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.

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

Grab for time to write instead of wait for time.

My reputation grows with every failure.

Sorrow was all my soul; I scarce believed, Till grief did tell me roundly, that I lived.

Sometimes it's a struggle to live in the moment.

We are going to learn more by what we see than by what we hear. Our actions speak so loudly that we don't have to say a word.. Words only account for about seven percent of our communication.

When there is no desire, all things are at peace

To enter into the hearts of men belongs to him who can explore the human heart.

When you understand the Atonement, then you understand the joy of being rescued.

Books have been my classroom and my confidant. Books have widened my horizons. Books have comforted me in my hardest times. Books have changed my life.

Beethoven and Beatles, Mozart and Michael Jackson, Paganini and Prince - I like them all.