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.

I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.

What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.

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.

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

I felt a little lost as a student. At Iowa, I felt as if I had gotten into this program that was going to save me, and so I moved myself across the country for grad school and yet still didn't have a home. It was upsetting. And I know that's a common feeling.