Essays Quotes - Page 5

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

  John D'Agata

  Sometimes, Ends, Knows

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• My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.

  Ishmael Reed

  Book, Writing, Boxing

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• What triggers a poem for me is not the same as what triggers an essay. My mind is geared now to looking for, or to watching out for, the image that attracts my attention or the phrase or the strange juxtaposition that strikes me bodily, or an odd question or supposition.

  Pattiann Rogers

  Mind, Juxtaposition, Attention

  "A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers". Interview with Carolyn Perry, Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

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• As far as I can tell, writing the essays didn't change the way I wrote poetry. Although the essays contain scattered passages that might be called lyrical, they often contain closed statements of what is only suggested in the poetry.

  Pattiann Rogers

  Writing, Might, Way

  "A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers". Interview with Carolyn Perry, Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

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• Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book...

  Pattiann Rogers

  Book, Order, Important

  "A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers". Interview with Carolyn Perry, Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

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• Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Winter, Thinking

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy, Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• In essay writing, I'm trying to push the form of expository writing. I'm trying to remember, trying to reckon, trying to find connections with the world, the nation and me, but I'm always trying to push the form, too, without being too obvious that I'm trying to push the form.

  Kiese Laymon

  Writing, Always Trying, Connections

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.

  Herbert Spencer

  Art, Expression, Feelings

  Herbert Spencer (1868). “Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative”, p.46

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• 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

  Boring, Last Time

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• I hate the tribal hatred thesis - in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and places like that they kill each other because that's just what people do there. I think it's profoundly ignorant. I was astonished when Samuel Huntington wrote his famous clash of civilizations essay in response to the Yugoslavian war. I was on the streets in Sarajevo and every other person I met came from a mixed marriage. And here is Professor Huntington from Harvard writing this is a clash of civilizations. That was absurd.

  Payam Akhavan

  War, Hate, Writing

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination." Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm... all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.

  Stephen Dunn

  Breakup, Taken, Reality

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate. There's a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality." I wanted to examine that great homogenizing force that came in during the '90s, since Hollywood seemed a place where it was particularly active.

  Matthew Specktor

  Dream, Drama, Rich

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

  World

  "Loitering: A Conversation with Essayist and Author Charles D'Ambrosio". Interview With Chris Schluep, www.amazonbookreview.com. February 3, 2016.

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• Even with an assignment, I take over, I find a freedom and make the idea my own, and that's where you get the sense that the essays become something very different than the original subject. Assignments are great, though - they test your mettle, your spirit and resilience. All of sudden you drop in, you don't know anything, you're vulnerable and available.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Resilience, Different, Spirit

  "Loitering: A Conversation with Essayist and Author Charles D'Ambrosio". Interview With Chris Schluep, www.amazonbookreview.com. February 3, 2016.

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• My presence isn't simply about "character" - I'm present in every part and particle of the thing, in the sound and rhythm of the sentences, in the shifting tones and the selection of details, in the comedy, the sadness, and the confusion. For the space of an essay, I'm the air you breathe, everywhere and nowhere. With a personal essay, I don't think you'd want it any other way. You ought to have the sense of an encounter, the impression of having met someone. In my essays, for better or worse, that someone is me.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Character, Sadness, Thinking

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• Too much me is annoying under any circumstance, but too much me in an essay, however personal, would mar the art. My "character" in the essay is more like a perspective, an angle of vision, a complicating factor, a questioning presence. I don't sit on the sidelines or pretend to objectivity; and I'm not afraid to stick my neck out or to be revealing and vulnerable.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Art, Character, Perspective

  "Loitering: A Conversation with Essayist and Author Charles D'Ambrosio". Interview With Chris Schluep, www.amazonbookreview.com. February 3, 2016.

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• We need to be ambivalent - in the essay, and in life too. Ambivalence - having mixed feelings, entertaining contradiction, living with fluctuation - is a widened embrace. It's about the coexistence of things, and in that light, we have no choice in the matter.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Choices, Feelings, Contradiction

  "Loitering: A Conversation with Essayist and Author Charles D'Ambrosio". Interview With Chris Schluep, www.amazonbookreview.com. February 3, 2016.

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• I suppose I like certainty as much as anyone else, but I also feel that the hidden costs are high, that we pay a heavy price for our convictions. This is a human issue as well as a writing issue - at least in the personal essay as I practice it. Any real essayist knows that certainty is an editorial decision, arrived at not through conviction but through suppression, the denial of a whole range of possibilities, of alternatives that we jettison, sometimes necessarily, in order to steady the ship.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Real, Writing, Decision

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• The poet Amanda Nadelberg puts it nicely in an interview when she says "often what I listen for in poems is a sense that the writer is a little lost, not deliberately withholding information or turning on the heavy mystery machines, but honestly confounded - by the world? isn't it so? - and letting others listen in on that figuring." That's what engages me - the mind in motion, the drama of someone in the process of thinking - and it's the elusive mystery of those movements that I hope to capture in my essays.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Drama, Thinking, Mind

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• My instinct tells me "purpose" is maybe the enemy of a good personal essay. In my own experience, I'm always lost and wandering and searching - where am I? how'd I get in this mess? what's the point? - right through to the final draft, and sometimes even beyond that - baffled and defeated still, confused as to purpose long after the thing's in print. I never really have a guiding purpose or a point, not at the outset, anyway. It's like life: It's all discovered en route.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Confused, Long, Enemy

  "Loitering: A Conversation with Essayist and Author Charles D'Ambrosio". Interview With Chris Schluep, www.amazonbookreview.com. February 3, 2016.

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• Nowadays I imagine people find freer and more accepting venues in blogs, on Tumblr and Instagram and Facebook, in the riot of shouting that trails in the wake of every news story. So there's always the pandemonium of the Internet, if you need to get your lunatic opinions out in public. I find most of that stuff a little insane-making and my preference is to encounter personal essays in the relatively sedate and stable universe of print, in literary quarterlies, magazines and books. But I'm sure you can find plenty of good stuff in lonely outposts all across the World Wide Web.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Lonely, Book, People

  "Loitering: A Conversation with Essayist and Author Charles D'Ambrosio". Interview With Chris Schluep, www.amazonbookreview.com. February 3, 2016.

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• I like the desperado aspect of essays, the free lance, that mercenary kind of thing, so I just do it, without asking anyone's permission. I've never written a query letter, I don't pitch pieces, I have no market in mind, I don't spend any time trying to figure out where I might fit in.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Mind, Trying, Kind

  "Loitering: A Conversation with Essayist and Author Charles D'Ambrosio". Interview With Chris Schluep, www.amazonbookreview.com. February 3, 2016.

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• I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.

  Samantha Hunt

  Hopeful, Terrible, Novel

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I never really wanted to be a daily critic who goes out every night and writes 300 word reviews, I wanted to write essays. And that gave me the luxury to be able to go out and if it was lousy, I could just say, well the hell with that, I'll go to hear something else, or, I'll go tomorrow night; I as writing for a weekly.

  Gary Giddins

  Writing, Night, Tomorrow

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I try to use my privilege to deconstruct from inside the racist, homophobic, heterocentric house, as an ally, while compatriot tools dismantle the patriarch's house. I do this by pushing the boundaries of what makes a poem and what makes an essay. My tools are blur, cross, pulverize, confront, remember.

  James Allen Hall

  House, Trying, Racist

  Source: therumpus.net

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