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.

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.

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.

But Little League can be a great experience for kids, as long as they want to play--and don't play to bring their parents glory.

I smiled sadly and whispered, "I would have taken a bullet for you, too, you know.""I know, " he whispered gruffly and lifted my chin, "and that pisses me off and turns me on at the same time.

Democracy not only requires equality but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who is then equal.

I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.

It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide.

Only that, nothing more - a tiny beam of light to show some hidden aspect of reality, to help decipher and understand it and thus to initiate, if possible, a change in the conscience of some readers.

Curiosity is the direct incontinence of the spirit.

Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.

The Dalai Lama says that when a Catholic and a Buddhist speak, the Buddhist becomes a deeper Buddhist and the Catholic becomes a deeper Catholic.

He (Roberto Clemente) is a hero to me.