It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library.

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.

Don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines.

Lily Tomlin...I used to watch reruns of Laugh-In and she was always my favorite part. She's this very unique talent and the way she does things has been a very big influence on me.

I know from experience that beneath every peripheral girl is a central truth. She’s hiding hers away, but at the same time she wants me to see it.

The only thing left worth saving is wilderness.

I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes.

No man can be a sound lawyer in this land who is not well read in the ethics of Moses and the virtues of Jesus.

Whatever you do, do it for love. If you keep to that, your path will never wander so far from the light that you can never return.

Before we are citizens, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty.

When you get close enough to someone you're never really alone again.

Next? Growing up to be Clint Eastwood, I hope.