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.

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.

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

Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.

I have to go. I have to be brave.

I only watch MSNBC for the news.

personally I don't trust literature that soothes people's consciences.

I'm a baseball freak.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

Competition can damage self-esteem, create anxiety, and lead to cheating and hurt feelings. But so can romantic love.

You can really do more than you think you can do.

Narrow all your interests until the attitude of mind and heart and body is concentration on Jesus Christ.

I find comedy to be really scary, because it can go so wrong so easily, and the margin for error is so huge - and I guess that's what makes it funny, that tension.