In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.

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.

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities..

Then that's what the Northern Lights are. All the lives that we're not living.

I wish to stay drenchedforeverin those rain-blue eyesin those...soul-reaching crystalsnot moving a musclenor breathingjustsavoringthis turquoise acheagainst my heart.

Neither the Army nor the Navy is of any protection, or very little protection, against aerial raids.

There was a girl I loved in high school - but never spoke to. Cut to my five-year reunion: I'm an entirely different person.

I still feel that French cooking is the most important in the world, one of the few that has rules. If you follow the rules, you can do pretty well.

The end / of passion / may refashion / a friend.

We make choices. No one else can live our lives for us. And we must confront and accept the consequences of our actions.

Outside is the world; it's there. Pop Art looks out into the world.

Despite the fact that I'm not highly skilled in any visual art, aesthetics have always played a strong role in my art, including my first albums.