If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur.

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.

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

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.

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

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.

The essay community should have hundreds of anthologies from hundreds of different perspectives that are constantly introducing us to new writers, new work, and new visions for our genre. The whole spirit of these anthologies is that there should never be a last word in how essays are interpreted or what they can be.