What’s old doesn’t need to be old-fashioned. It gets reborn.

It is a curious fact that the word essayist showed up in English before it existed in French.

I'm just saying, take courage. That and pretty much that alone is never the incorrect thing to do.

There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word—tension—has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end—is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be?

This is why you can never reason true Christians out of the faith. It's not, as the adage has it, because they were never reasoned into it - many were - it's that faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping.

Ireland starts for me with the end of The Dead, which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

At GQ, there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.