Quotes on Essays

Indeed, theological discourse offers its strange jubilation only to the strict extent that it permits and, dangerously, demands of it wokman that he speak beyond his means, precisely because he does not speak of himself. Hence the danger of a speech that, in a sense, speaks against the one who lends himself to it. One must obtain forgiveness for every essay in theology. In all senses.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.

Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.

In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time

I understood that you would take the Human Race in the concrete, have exploded the absurd notion of Pope's Essay on Man, [Erasmus] Darwin, and all the countless Believers-even (strange to say) among Xtians-of Man's having progressed from an Ouran Outang state-so contrary to all History, to all Religion, nay, to all Possibility-to have affirmed a Fall in some sense.

I don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.'

I'm most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page sunrise over the desert and masses of a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.