Meghan Daum Quotes

I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications.

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.

What I think is important about essayists, about the essay as opposed to a lot of personal writing is that the material has to be presented in a processed way. I'm just not interested in writing, "Hey, this is what happened to me today." You get to a place that has very little to do with your personal experience and talks about some larger idea or something in the culture. I don't think you can get to that unless you have had a lot of time to gestate and maybe if I was taking a lot of notes while stuff was going on, I wouldn't be able to get to that place as easily.

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

I do love editorials - you're free to do whatever you want and portray a different character.

When we as a society lose the ability to comment on what we see and to have an opinion on what we are exposed to, then we have all lost what makes us unique on this planet.

What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting.

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.

Liberals are sometimes defined as people who can't take their own side in an argument.

I got my degree in rhetoric.

I aspire to write what are called 'familiar essays.' They begin in the personal and end in the universal. It's not for me to say if I have been successful at it. But that is the hope.

I don't like writing essays or theory.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.

In the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion .... The more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those that are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

I love James Baldwin's autobiographical writing.

I'm a firm believer in putting your experiences in your writing, of bleeding into the page.

The best thing, on 'Question Time,' is when the reality confronts the rhetoric.

It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.

People would much rather argue their own visions and conceptions about a book than engage in a dialogue with the author, because the author could always trump you with, 'I wrote it.'

I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.