You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.

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.

In space, you don't get that much noise. Noise doesn't propagate in a vacuum.

When to mischief mortals bend their will, how soon they find it instruments of ill.

It's the doubt that is really a major ingredient of the paranoid thriller.

Tolerance for intolerance is not tolerance at all.

Let go of thought, become still and alert, and don't try to understand or explain.

We cannot think of ourselves save as to some extent social being. Hence, we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and our own good from our idea of others and their good.

If you are going to flip something, you must have the courage of your convictions.

When I'm working on a serious and solid book ... I read about a detective novel a day. It's the best legal dope in the world. It makes you feel good until the next morning you can work again.

I think for a long time it seemed like working in an art form and being a feminist meant portraying women in a perfect, angelic light. And there's nothing feminist about that.

For women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places.