Essays Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• At first I was blogging everyday, but I don't do that anymore. It varies; sometimes I'll write these little essays and other times political commentaries. Other times it'll just be new work that I'm doing.

  Stephen Vincent Benet

  Writing, Political, Everyday

  Source: www.raintaxi.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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• 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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• I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

  John D'Agata

  Environment, Stranger, Wanted

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. It tracks the evolution of a single consciousness in order to give us an experience - an experience of looking for something and then finding ourselves in a different place by the time we've finished our journey.

  John D'Agata

  Journey, Order, Track

  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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• Of course it's possible for political essays to be artful. I just want to call into question the dominance of content over form in the history of the essay. I want us to recognize that there's art involved in making this stuff, because we still don't approach the constructed nature of the essay with the same appreciation that we do poetry or fiction.

  John D'Agata

  Appreciation, Art, Political

  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 relevant features of scientific practice often have mundane explanations which don't point to any deep metaphysical moral. (Thus it would simply be messy and pointless for the chemists to essay physical reductions, or for the biologists to offer number-free explanations. It's a weird kind of science-worship that views these practical considerations as clues to the nature of reality.)

  David Papineau

  Reality, Numbers, Views

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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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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• In the morning I'd write these essays, anything that I'd feel like writing, and in the afternoon, I'd spend time with my guitar. I had decided after listening to my last four or five albums that my biggest weakness musically was melody. the reason I had been singing in a monotone over the chord patterns in my songs was that I never practiced doing melodies.

  Iggy Pop

  Song, Morning, Writing

  "New Again: Iggy Pop". Interview With Lisa Robinson, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 23, 2016.

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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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• When I got to college, I planned to be a math major, and, in addition to signing up for some math courses, I decided to take some philosophy. Quite by chance, I took a philosophy of science course in which the entire semester was devoted to reading Locke's Essay. I was hooked. For the next few semesters, I took nothing but philosophy and math courses, and it wasn't long before I realised that it was the philosophy that really moved me.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Reading, Math

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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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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• 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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• 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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• For many years I have devoted articles and essays to newspapers, from the inside. So criticism of the newspapers was a topic that I practiced for a long time.

  Umberto Eco

  Years, Long, Criticism

  Interview with Chris Wallace, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 2, 2015.

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• I'm not much a TV reporter, as in someone who covers the daily machinations of the television industry, though I certainly follow it and weave it into my reviews and essays about the medium.

  Hank Stuever

  Television, Tvs, Reviews

  "What to Watch: TV chat with Hank Stuever". Live Chat, live.washingtonpost.com. November 12, 2015.

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• I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

  Maya Angelou

  Grandmother, Men, Years

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• Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.

  Dan Savage

  Growing Up, Book, Writing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces.

  Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  Writing, Pieces, Favourite

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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. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who enjoy bird walks enjoys theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new 'attempt,' differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

  E. B. White

  Country, Writing, Men

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

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