Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.

The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.

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.

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

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

We live in a world where words are as meaningless as a snowflake in a blizzard

Except for events that carry great weight, it is not experience per se, but how they match expectations, that governs their emotional impact

I keep thinking about blood, I dream about it. Wake up thinking about it. Pretty soon I'll be writing morbid emo poetry about it.

I'm not a role model... Just because I dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids.

One regret dear world, that I am determined not to have when I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough.

As an actor, I look at first what I can borrow from what I really feel.

The written tone and the spoken tone change and the reporters' disbelief in the veracity of the government spreads to the readers and the viewers.

You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.