The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.

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

I would ask the people who were generous toward my own work. After class one day a poetry professor said to me, "Hey, there's this guy Basho you would find interesting," and so I found Basho. A fiction teacher told me, "You ought to read Clarice Lispector if you're interested in that sort of in-between stuff," and then Lispector appeared. It's not magic. You just keep your eyes open.

I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment. Also, roughly around the time we were doing this fact-checking. And I never really understood why people think what nonfiction's job is to give them information as opposed to something else.

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

Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.

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.