I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

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.

I don’t believe it! You’re still interested in the girl, despite the fact that she might be some kind of alien. Does this sickness of yours have any bounds?

If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.

I'm offended every time I see George Bush on TV!

I don't like to look at myself in the mirror, which is why my eye makeup is always crooked.

If space suits looked less like marshmallows, I'd be more interested in going to the moon.

In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness; he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother's knee.

Other-Love is writing's first name.

When I was secretary of state, we actually increased American exports globally 30 percent. We increased them to China 50 percent.

I did not like the way I looked in a pair of white pants.

We must declare war on war, so the outcome will be peace upon peace.