Essayists Quotes - Page 6

• It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

  Alexander Chee

  Spiritual, Writing, Thinking

  "Go Forth (Vol. 41)". Interview with Kristen Evans, logger.believermag.com. February 26, 2016.

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• I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

  John D'Agata

  School, Program, Grad

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• What I'm doing is exploring things. This is why I'm a fiction writer rather than an essayist or a politician or whatever. I just gather material and find a scenario, and see where it takes me. I don't have a plan.

  T.C. Boyle

  Fiction, Politician, Take Me

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• By now, legions of tireless essayists and op-ed columnists have dressed feminists down for making such a fuss about entering the professions and earning equal pay that everyone's attention has been distracted from the important contributions of mothers working at home. This judgment presumes, of course, that prior to the resurgence of feminism in the '70s, housewives and mothers enjoyed wide recognition and honor. This was not exactly the case.

  Mary Blakely

  Mother, Home, Equal Pay

  Mary Kay Blakely (1995). “American Mom: Motherhood, Politics, and Humble Pie”, p.36, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Fiction, Jay Gould, Essays

  Interview with Alex Burack, www.literarytraveler.com. May 4, 2007.

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• One of my favorite writers is short story writer/essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind. I'm not claiming to be anything remotely resembling a talent of Borges' caliber, but he is an inspiration and a proof that one can be a meaningful and successful writer while blind.

  Larry Howes

  Meaningful, Inspiration, Successful

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

  John Jeremiah Sullivan

  Facts, Curious

  "The Ill-Defined Plot" by John Jeremiah Sullivan, www.newyorker.com. October 6, 2014.

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• The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

  Manuel Puig

  Intellectual, Novelists, Literature

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• Christopher Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language.

  Christopher Buckley

  Language, English Language

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• Quotations are powerful tools. Michel de Montaigne, the father of all essayists, observed, 'I quote others only to better express myself.' Intrepid quotations detective Ralph Keyes helps us to discover the clear truth about exactly what was said and who exactly said it.

  Richard Lederer

  Powerful, Father, Tools

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• The late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist, and social observer, wrote in his autobiographical Appointments, 1890-1901 (1902), "When one travels abroad, one doesn't so much discover the hidden Wonders of the World, but the hidden wonders of the individuals with whom one is traveling. They may turn out to afford a stirring view, a rather dull landscape, or a terrain so treacherous one finds it's best to forget the entire affair and return home.

  Marisha Pessl

  Home, Views, World

  Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.280, Penguin

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• No matter what the cause, even though it be to conquer with tanks and planes and modern artillery some defenseless black population, there will be no lack of poets and preachers and essayists and philosophers to invent the necessary reasons and gild the infamy with righteousness. To this righteousness there is, of course, never an adequate reply. Thus a war to end poverty becomes an unanswerable enterprise. For who can decently be for poverty? To even debate whether the war will end poverty becomes an exhibition of ugly pragmatism and the sign of an ignoble mind.

  John T. Flynn

  War, Black, Mind

  John Thomas Flynn (1944). “As We Go Marching”, p.122, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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• I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Language Words, Joy

  William Faulkner (2011). “Essays, Speeches & Public Letters”, p.296, Modern Library

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• I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature…literature should be left to essayists.

  Jacqueline Susann

  Thinking, Novelists, Literature

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• I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

  Jose Saramago

  Novelists, Poetic, Playwright

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• We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.

  Edward Bernays

  Leadership, Teacher, Issues

  Edward Bernays (2017). “Propaganda”, p.5, Lulu.com

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• The essayist . . . can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter - philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast.

  E. B. White

  Philosophy, Devil, Matter

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.215, Cornell University Press

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• The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

  E. B. White

  Writing, Men, Thinking

  E. B. White (2014). “Essays of E. B. White”, p.4, Harper Collins

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• Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

  Leo Rosten

  Time, Laughter, Thinking

  Leo Calvin Rosten (1959). “The return of H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n”

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• The most offensive egotist is he that fears to say "I" and "me." "It will probably rain" - that is dogmatic. "I think it will rain" - that is natural and modest. Montaigne is the most delightful of essayists because so great is his humility that he does not think it important that we see not Montaigne. He so forgets himself that he employs no artifice to make us forget him.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Rain, Humility, Thinking

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2696, Delphi Classics

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• There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.

  Charles J. Shields

  Self, Fiction, Texture

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

  Nicholson Baker

  Writing, Poet, Essays

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• Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable.

  William Ernest Henley

  Men, Done, Pity

  William Ernest Henley (1921). “Views and reviews”

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• Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.

  William Ernest Henley

  Reading, World, Remember

  William Ernest Henley (1921). “The Works of William Ernest Henley: Views and reviews”

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• I'm a woofer, not a tweeter; a writer, not a telegrapher; an essayist, not an aphorist.

  Richard Turner

  Internet

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