Quotes & Sayings About Essayists

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

The issue is the ethnocentric history that the New York task force, the Portland Baseline essayists, and other Afrocentric ideologues propose for American children. The issue is the teaching of bad history under whatever ethnic banner. Cn any historian justify the proposition that the five ethnic communities into which the New York state task force wishes to divide the country had equal influence on the development of the United States? Is it a function of schools to teach ethnic and racial pride? When does obsession with differences begin to threaten the idea of an overarching American nationality? — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

By now, legions of tireless essayists and op-ed columnists have dressed feminists down for making such a fuss about entering the professions and earning equal pay that everyone's attention has been distracted from the important contributions of mothers working at home. This judgment presumes, of course, that prior to the resurgence of feminism in the '70s, housewives and mothers enjoyed wide recognition and honor. This was not exactly the case. — Mary Blakely

The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone's sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice. — Alison Roberta Noble Neilans

Essayists must not only be succinct but have original ideas and, even harder to come by, or to fake, likable voices. Consciously or not, they endeavor to win us over by charm. If an essayist can not only charm but write the unforgettable sentence, one that reveals the heart in a few words, I'm her slave. — Cyra McFadden

Christopher Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language. — Christopher Buckley

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays. — Nicholson Baker

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

I'm a woofer, not a tweeter; a writer, not a telegrapher; an essayist, not an aphorist. — Richard Turner

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature ... literature should be left to essayists. — Jacqueline Susann

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

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

Only where there is life can there be home. — Joyce Carol Oates

Plenty of times I've seen writers, famous novelists and essayists, even poets, with names you'd recognize and whose work I admire, drift through these offices on one high-priced assignment or other. I have seen the anxious, weaselly lonely looks in their eyes, seen them sit at the desk we give them in a far cubicle, put their feet up and start at once to talk in loud, jokey, bluff, inviting voices, trying like everything to feel like members of the staff, holding court, acting like good guys, ready to give advice or offer opinions on anything anybody wants to know. In other words, having the time of their lives.
And who could blame them? Writers - all writers - need to belong. Only for real writers, unfortunately, their club is a club with just one member. — Richard Ford

The most offensive egotist is he that fears to say "I" and "me." "It will probably rain " that is dogmatic. "I think it will rain" that is natural and modest. Montaigne is the most delightful of essayists because so great is his humility that he does not think it important that we see not Montaigne. He so forgets himself that he employs no artifice to make us forget him. — Ambrose Bierce

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

No matter what the cause, even though it be to conquer with tanks and planes and modern artillery some defenseless black population, there will be no lack of poets and preachers and essayists and philosophers to invent the necessary reasons and gild the infamy with righteousness. To this righteousness there is, of course, never an adequate reply. Thus a war to end poverty becomes an unanswerable enterprise. For who can decently be for poverty? To even debate whether the war will end poverty becomes an exhibition of ugly pragmatism and the sign of an ignoble mind. — John T. Flynn

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

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

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

Jane Jacobs work wouldnt have been complete if it hadn't inspired others to carry it on, and evolve Jane's groundbreaking accomplishments so that the essential kernel of thought remains relevant for future generations. The essayists in What We See have built on those essential footholds that people who have never heard of Jane Jacobs will benefit from for decades. — Majora Carter

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