Essays Quotes - Page 9

• The "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others" essay was so hard to write because of the memories, the sensory stuff, but also because it didn't follow the form of any essay that I've ever read. And the truth that I was exploring necessitated that obliteration of traditional form, I think.

  Kiese Laymon

  Memories, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Like when you pick up a book and you don't realize what type of text it is - it could be an essay, a novel, a biography - and at one point you realize you don't know where, as a reader, you want to be. Where are you going with this text? What is the goal? How are you supposed to interpret what you're reading? And people's responses vary - some dislike it, and are put off by the confusion, the lack of comprehension.

  Sergio Chejfec

  Book, Reading, Goal

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

  Claudia Rankine

  Fall, Writing, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications.

  Meghan Daum

  Book, Done, Firsts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

  Kate Christensen

  Book, Pay, Blogging

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

  Kate Christensen

  Writing, Voice, Ease

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Ingredients, Novel

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I try to be aware of what I'm concerned about, aware of how I feel about myself in the world, aware of how I feel about the issues of the day, but I guess I don't want to write essays in my head about my craft and maybe it's because I teach and talk about craft of other writers as a reader. I feel the moment I start doing that is when it's going to kill me.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Writing, Issues, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I love writing things down so pretty much every card I send to friends or family is an over enthusiastic essay. I've written some pretty good ones in my time.

  Rae Morris

  Writing, Cards, Enthusiastic

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• I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

  Julianna Baggott

  Writing, Plot, Want

  Interview with Roxane Gay, therumpus.net. May 11, 2012.

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• As for not getting things right: I constantly rerun social situations/conversations I experience/have throughout my head, and I'm always writing them down in notebooks or in word documents/the Internet. I feel like these habits and a generally good memory of people/the interactions I have with them (due to studying people having always been my main interest in life) have lead me to being very accurate in things I write in stories/essays.

  Marie Calloway

  Notebook, Memories, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The reason for writing that essay was less a personal agenda than an attempt to explain my unease with the general label of "immigrant literature" after I had read quite a number of reviews (in different countries) involving books written by 'immigrants.'

  Sasa Stanisic

  Country, Book, Writing

  "The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #3: Sasa Stanisic On The Danube". Interview with Michael Zelenko, therumpus.net. January 25, 2010.

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• At the time I was first writing the stories/essays that appear in Oedipus Wrecked, I was still under the impression that people would be delighted to see their name in print. I overlooked the fact that I was writing about intimate matters, and people are a bit touchy about airing their private lives in such a public fashion. Especially when it's done without their consent.

  Kevin Keck

  Fashion, Writing, Oedipus

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I would say that my great political awakening was really born on Okinawa, reading Albert Camus: the "Neither Victims nor Executioners" essay and The Rebel. I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I hated myself. I hated my life. I thought nobody wanted me.

  Sam Hamill

  Reading, Kids, Years

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• Eleanor Roosevelt loved to write. She was a wonderful child writer. I mean, she wrote beautiful essays and stories as a child. And Marie Souvestre really appreciated Eleanor Roosevelt's talents and encouraged her talents. Also, she spoke perfect French. She grew up speaking French. She's now at a french-speaking school where, you know, girls are coming from all over the world. Not everybody speaks French.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Beautiful, Girl, Children

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.

  John D'Agata

  Nonfiction, Students, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.

  John D'Agata

  Writing, School, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.

  John D'Agata

  College, Thinking, Littles

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Back in the day, a lot of our instructors in nonfiction were actually fiction scholars. So they would bring in stories as models for the essay. And in some ways that's a good idea, because we can all learn from other genres. But I think it also made me realize that I literally didn't have an essay model, and that if I wanted one I would have to find it.

  John D'Agata

  Thinking, Ideas, Fiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.

  John D'Agata

  Movement, Want, Figures

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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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• Yet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and say "You don't belong here. That's not how we do things." I think that's problematic.

  John D'Agata

  Thinking, World, Today

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur.

  John D'Agata

  Boys, Facts, Posters

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The essay community should have hundreds of anthologies from hundreds of different perspectives that are constantly introducing us to new writers, new work, and new visions for our genre. The whole spirit of these anthologies is that there should never be a last word in how essays are interpreted or what they can be.

  John D'Agata

  Should Have, Perspective, Community

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.

  John D'Agata

  Art, Thinking, Mind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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