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 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.

I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.

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

I like Plutarch because I've read him forever, and I know that he's incredibly funky, even though his mainstream image is as Mr. Unfunky.

If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.

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.