If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur.

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 go jogging for 25 minutes every morning, even if I'm away from home.

Got a brand new semi-automatic weapon with a laser sight. Oh, I'm praying that somebody tries to break in here tonight.

Everyone has ocean's to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?

A man who did not have but one wife in the Resurrection that woman will not be his but be taken from him & given to another.

I will miss the Batman. I like to think that he'll miss me, but he's never been particularly sentimental.

In Washington I'm thought of as a conservative, but in Tennessee I'm thought of as a Bolshevik.

For to keep at the top is harder almost than to get there

Don't invest in what you don't know. Learn first then invest.

If there's a Disney animated feature based in Hawaii, I knew I had to be part of it. I'm very proud to be from Hawaii. There was no question the role was mine.

Beautiful thoughts, build a beautiful soul.