1.
In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.
Jose Saramago
2.
Most good essays are conversations with yourself - not just your decided thoughts but your dilemmas.
Phillip Lopate
3.
Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.
Arnold J. Toynbee
5.
The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy
Theodor Adorno
6.
I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
Zadie Smith
7.
I didn't really have a major role in how it was described. I wanted it to be a collection of essays where each storyline could be contained.
Chelsea Martin
8.
Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.
John D'Agata
9.
I don't know if I have a book in me, but I'm sure I have more essays.
Eden Robinson
10.
The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.
Kathleen Rooney
11.
I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
12.
Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
Nicholson Baker
13.
I have lots of fiction in the drawer, but the essays I mostly kick out into the world, ready or not. Fiction incubates differently, I suppose.
Charles D'Ambrosio
14.
You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.
Phillip Lopate
15.
I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
16.
There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.
Virginia Woolf
17.
The last time I was asked that, I said "A Year Without Spoons." Normally you get asked the same questions over and over, so it feels boring to say the same thing. But then I was like, I don't even know another essay I like. They're all good.
Chelsea Martin
18.
Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.
Phillip Lopate
19.
I always did well on the essay questions. Just put everything you know on there, maybe you'll hit it.
Jerry Seinfeld
20.
I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.
Alan Lightman