All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge.

If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they'll forget all the bad stuff

For so long I didn't have any kind of readership at all - I'd get published, but not read - the idea of writing for an audience is so anathema to me, it's never bothered me.

I think I do have a sort of terrible propensity for boredom and for being bored, even though I am absolutely of the opinion that one shouldn't be bored and that there is no excuse for it and that it is a personal failing.

I think I can recognize when a piece is at a state of completion. I always say to my wife, "Oh yeah, it's roughly finished." I've got it there. And then there's that whole other phase of moving on to properly amp up the sentences and sometimes to move stuff around as well.

[William] Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation.

I like these nonfiction books where everything that is interesting about them is lost in that catch-all description of their "about"-ness.