Phillip Lopate
The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.Collection: Beach
Most good essays are conversations with yourself - not just your decided thoughts but your dilemmas.Collection: Conversation
A personal essay often includes some or a lot of personal confession. That makes the reader feel less lonely in their confusion and darkness.Collection: Lonely
The essay must be artistically rendered: You must keep the reader engaged, whether with wit, conflict, mischief, and/or yes, with honesty.Collection: Honesty
Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator.Collection: Narrators
I am apt to be harsh in my secret judgments of others, seeing them as defective because they are not enough like me.Collection: Secret
Doubt is my boon companion, the faithful St. Bernard ever at my side. Whether writing essays or just going about daily life, I am constantly second-guessing myself. My mind is filled with 'yes, buts,' 'so whats?' and other skeptical rejoinders. I am forever monitoring myself for traces of folly, insensitivity, arrogance, false humility, cruelty, stupidity, immaturity and, guess what, I keep finding examples. Age has not made me wiser, except maybe in retrospect.Collection: Humility
The trick is to realize that one is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.Collection: Lonely
Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience.Collection: Fun
In the best nonfiction, it seems to me, you're always made aware that you are being engaged with a supple mind at work. The story line or plot in nonfiction consists of the twists and turns of a thought process working itself out.Collection: Mind
The essay is a wonderful medium. I might mention that some writers who longed to be novelists were better as essayists: Sontag, Baldwin, Vidal, Mary McCarthy, Mailer.Collection: Novelists
I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations.Collection: Expectations
It bothers me when I can't, for example, remember a name. I don't know if it's pre-senility or whether there are too many names packed in our brains.Collection: Names
In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort.Collection: Effort
The knowledge that my discriminations are skewed and not always universally desirable doesn't stop me in the least from making them.Collection: Discrimination
Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.Collection: Creativity
Think of a dinner party as a club of revolutionaries, a technocratic elite whose social interactions that night are a dry run for some future takeover of the state.Collection: Running
Hedonism can be a rational response to a difficult life.Collection: Difficult
I'm fortunate in being able to find great satisfaction in my work.Collection: Able
I really do like to write and when I'm not, I think, "Okay, I'll be a good citizen now" but fact is, that's secondary.Collection: Writing
If someone in my family is getting emotionally bent out of shape, I've had to learn to adapt.Collection: Shapes
My wife and daughter have accused me of being too silent at breakfast but I don't want to talk when I don't have much to say.Collection: Daughter
Domesticity has been a challenge for me but painful as it's been, engaging with family has been a school for reducing solipsism and increasing my understanding of people's different reactions to stress.Collection: Stress
Why am I attracted to all these lying quotes all of a sudden? Here’s another one. This one by Phillip Lopate: ‘(Children know it better than adults) that in telling a lie, fidelity is everything.’Collection: Children
I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a representation, to put it outside himself. A need to convert inner torment into some outward tangible wound that all could see. It was almost as though suicide were a last-ditch effort at exorcism, in which the person sacrificed his life in order that the devil inside might die.Collection: Suicide
My other work, teaching, also is satisfying because I can be with people but in controlled circumstances, which aren't as likely to yield the pain of dealing with family.Collection: Pain
Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.Collection: Contradictory
You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.Collection: Wheels
I've had an enduring appreciation of psychology.Collection: Appreciation
For most of my life, I have wanted broad impact but now, at 72, I'm not so sure that's always my first priority.Collection: Impact
Indeed, at times it's best to shut up.Collection: Shut Up
The dinner party is a suburban form of entertainment. Its spread in our big cities represents an insidious Fifth Column suburbanization of the metropolis.Collection: Party