Top 40 Essayist Quotes
#1. I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
Jose Saramago
#2. Christopher Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language.
Christopher Buckley
#3. 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
#4. The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker.
Eula Biss
#5. 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
#6. The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people. To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober.
-Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) US-English essayist, editor, anthologist
Logan Pearsall Smith
#7. 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.
Meghan Daum
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. - historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle
Carol Tavris
#11. 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.
Jose Saramago
#12. 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.
Meghan Daum
#13. 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
#14. The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.
Manuel Puig
#15. A cynic once told G. K. Chesterton, the British novelist and essayist, "Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." Chesterton's rejoinder? "Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall enjoy everything.
Benjamin Graham
#16. The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that "no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.
Michael Finkel
#17. Every essay - the subject matter of every essay - is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
Alan Lightman
#18. including Edna Millay, there were five such women: essayist Maeve Brennan, columnist Neith Boyce, novelist Edith Wharton, and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Kate Bolick
#19. Any essayist setting out on a frail apparatus of notings and jottings is a brave person.
Diane Johnson
#20. The difference between a story and an essay is that the storyteller just wants to entertain the reader, while the essayist has been to graduate school.
Dinty W. Moore
#21. What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or - worse yet - leaving the blanks blank?
John D'Agata
#22. 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
#23. If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.
John D'Agata
#24. 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
#25. I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.
Walter Kirn
#26. So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#27. 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
#28. 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.
Flora Thompson
#29. Votes, this essayist insisted, not signatures, were the correct way to express the public will - a
Marla R. Miller
#30. Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love. - Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846 - 1916), American essayist
Susan Wiggs
#32. 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.
Michael Dirda
#33. I'm a woofer, not a tweeter; a writer, not a telegrapher; an essayist, not an aphorist.
Richard Turner
#34. It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#35. 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
#36. Essayist and philosopher Alain de Botton describes art as an apothecary for the soul.
Arianna Huffington
#37. Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
Agnes Repplier
#38. Love is a word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes
into a knot of flame
I am Black
because I come from the earth's inside
take my word for jewel
in the open light.
Audre Lorde
#39. The state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book
is one of the main reasons I read;
but it doesn't happen every time
or even every other time,
and when it does happen,
I am truly beside myself.
Nora Ephron
#40. Canceled checks will be to future historians and cultural anthropologists what the Dead Sea Scrolls and hieroglyphics are to us.
Brent Staples
