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.

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

You're often looking at writing from writers who, for the most part, are working in forms that traditionally fit into other genres. But sometimes, in the midst of their better-known stuff, there's this wayward thing, and because it's wayward it isn't considered representative of their work, so it falls through the cracks.

In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.

As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.

I'm not worried about what part of their life they needed to massage in order to achieve something that I get to experience as transcendent. Because that's the point of literature, I think: to connect.

The best stuff that Cicero wrote, in the first century in Rome, were the Philippics, a series of speeches that he delivered against Marc Antony, whom he thought was irreparably dismantling the Republic of Rome. Those speeches are powerful because they're not only really pointed but they're thrillingly beautiful - and that's precisely what made them dangerous: the fact that people wanted to read them.