Quotes About Essayist

Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author. Reasoning poers must be brought to reinforce imagination.

I read the other day in a book by a fashionable essayist that ghosts went out when electric light came in. What nonsense!

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

My sweet spot as a writer and, especially, as an essayist is sub-1500 words.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), the great American essayist, said "nothing great is ever achieved without enthusiasm." What a deconstructed culture lacks, because of its deep cynicism and pessimism about reality, is a basic confidence and enthusiasm that is necessary to start almost anything.

I don't think of myself as a critic at all. I'm a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings.

I think the biggest influence on my stand-up would be Chris Rock, in that I love that Chris is basically an essayist, in that he'll take a subject and just try and attack it from as many different angles as he can.

If you rely on a more conventional understanding of the term 'left-wing' as being associated with gradations of socialism in the emancipation of the working class, the Leap Manifesto looks something more along the lines of what the great British socialist and essayist George Orwell was on about in 'The Road to Wigan Pier' in 1937.

I'm an essayist. And this is a genre that has existed for a few thousand years. Ever heard of Cicero? So these rules that I'm working under are not mine but rather were established by writers who recognized the difference between the hard research of journalism and the kind of inquiry of mind that characterizes the essay.

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.

As both an essayist and science fiction and fantasy novelist, I write about and for the future. I talk about the past to remind us that what we believe has always been true - that men and women are somehow static categories, or that men in power has always been the default, or that same-sex love affairs were always taboo - has not always been thus.

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.

Creative non-fiction is such a liberating genre because it allows the non-fiction writer, whether he or she be journalist or essayist, to use all of the techniques of the fiction writer and all of the ideas, creative approaches, that fiction writers get a chance to use, but they have to use it in a true story.

A young female essayist saying they're influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they're influenced by Joni Mitchell.

And as an essayist, I am not judged by other writers, book editors, and book reviewers, but by readers. Readers? Maybe, but wait a minute…not today's readers. Only those of tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. So, my only real judge being time, it is the stability and robustness of the readership (that is, future readers) that counts.

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.

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.

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.

In his entry under the verb 'to antedate', Johnson quotes the essayist Jeremy Collier: 'By reading, a man does, as it were, antedate his life, and makes himself contemporary with the ages past.' It is Johnson's engagement with the past and his revival of a diffuse pot-pourri of materials that make the Dictionary such an unexpectedly vibrant work. At

In the year that al-Banna was killed, Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian civil servant and essayist, was on a fellowship in the United States. On his arrival, he had been overwhelmed by fear as to whether he could resist the "sinful temptation" that surely awaited him.

As essayist Lewis Hyde points out, self-mocking irony is always Sincerity, with a motive.

It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I'd been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining.

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.