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'Material' is meant to be a fun, lighthearted song about the tiny bit of materialism that's in all of us. The message is meant to translate the notion that you don't need luxury items to feel special; you already are special.

What I think is important about essayists - about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view - is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way.

I like going after good material, well-written material.

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

I like writing my own material - I'm pretty good at it.

I don't write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.

The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It's not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it's to challenge people, and it's to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material but I know it when I see it.

We are material creatures who spend much of our lives on material pursuits (even building a cathedral or writing a novel requires stone and mortar or paper and ink).

I write all of my material. It's all me.