Quotes About Essayists

#1. What I think is important about essayists - about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view - is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way.

Meghan Daum

#2. Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

Nicholson Baker

#3. I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature ... literature should be left to essayists.

Jacqueline Susann

#4. It's funny. People often compare me to other humor essayists. They're usually quite nice comparisons; I will accept those gladly. But I am always sort of appalled at the idea of being lumped with other, more chick-y female writers. And the truth is probably that neither comparison is accurate.

Sloane Crosley

#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. 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

#7. There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.

Charles J. Shields

#8. TEN GREATEST ENGLISH POETS Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning. TEN GREATEST ENGLISH ESSAYISTS Bacon, Addison, Steele, Macaulay, Lamb, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray and Matthew Arnold.

Joseph Devlin

#9. Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least, out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death.

Cynthia Ozick

#10. Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

Leo Rosten

#11. Quotations are powerful tools. Michel de Montaigne, the father of all essayists, observed, 'I quote others only to better express myself.' Intrepid quotations detective Ralph Keyes helps us to discover the clear truth about exactly what was said and who exactly said it.

Richard Lederer

#12. I hate telling people this. I never know exactly how my voice is going to sound saying it, and I hate the stricken looks they get on their faces when they don't know what to say back.

Kendare Blake

#13. On my bed, I sit down and flip through the cut-up books one by one, reading all the cut-up passages.

Jennifer Niven

#14. I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

Ernest Hemingway,

#15. Christopher Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language.

Christopher Buckley

#16. Only where there is life can there be home.

Joyce Carol Oates

#17. The name of the artist is more important to them than the quality of the work ... People criticize a picture by their ear

Okakura Kakuzo

#18. Every budget I have ever prepared has been balanced.

Ken Livingstone

#19. I'm a woofer, not a tweeter; a writer, not a telegrapher; an essayist, not an aphorist.

Richard Turner

#20. When we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.

Winston Churchill

#21. I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.

Karl Kraus

#22. Since, though I do not repent my amorous exploits, I am far from wanting my example to contribute to the corruption of the fair sex, which deserves our homage for so many reasons, I hope that my observations will foster prudence in fathers and mothers and thus at least deserve their esteem.

Giacomo Casanova

#23. Ray Charles, who said to Stevie Wonder, Maybe we're white. Never got a dinner!

Red Buttons

#24. If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It's the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you'll be miserable.

Daniel Kahneman

#25. God is indeed a jealous God. He cannot bear to see, that we had rather not with him, but with each other play.

Emily Dickinson