Essays Quotes

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.

Most good essays are conversations with yourself - not just your decided thoughts but your dilemmas.

Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.

The point of the essay is to change things.

The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy

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.

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.

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

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.

You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.

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.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

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.

Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.

I always did well on the essay questions. Just put everything you know on there, maybe you'll hit it.

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.

I don't know if I have a book in me, but I'm sure I have more essays.

The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.

I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.