I'm not an impersonator. I've only got one voice and only do one guy and his first-person essays.
And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. (“How to Write with Style”. Essay, 1985)
The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.
I had a book of essays out in 1997 in which I talked about the increasing virtuality of our lives. I've always been afraid of that in my own life.
The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.
The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.
I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
A lazy man works twice as hard. My mother told that to me, and now I say it to my kids. If you're writing an essay, keep it in the lines and in the margins so you don't have to do it over.
Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.
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'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.
I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
To prove to [her friend, Swedish diplomat Count] Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, "so that he would see whether I knew myself or not." The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled...
From the moment I was first pregnant, and those around me insisted that treats such as cold cuts and nail polish could cut my unborn child's potential IQ in half, I got into the habit of NOT seeking out the little things that brought me joy. Like sof...
My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking. You could be raped a thousand times and still be a virgin. I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel, the comfort women and teenage porno stars. Ms. Bain and Mr. Roto...
's Elements has been for nearly twenty-two centuries the encouragement and guide of that scientific thought which is one thing with the progress of man from a worse to a better state. The encouragement; for it contained a body of knowledge that was r...
Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
It is a disaster that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and always sends you away dissatisfied and fearful, whereas stubbornness and foolhardiness fill their hosts with joy and assurance.
