Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer.

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.

There are only two most powerful situations- being so small that you have nothing to lose and being so big that you don't care what you lose!

Step into the light and create your own shadow.

Psychobabble attempts to redefine the entire English language just to make a correct statement incorrect. Psychology is the study of why someone would try to do this.

Bring on the people you want me to love, the situations you want me to take on, and the lessons you want me to learn.

PLAGIARIZE, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.

It is easy to make acquaintances, but very difficult to shake them off, however irksome and unprofitable they are found, after we have once committed ourselves to them.

Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

I was in television drama, which is a first cousin to the movies, and I trust myself to make the right decisions.

I wouldn't give a performer something I couldn't deliver myself.

The way you look on the outside has a definite bearing on how you feel and see yourself on the inside.