I wrote an essay about leaf blowers and the evil they do.
While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest.
We approach nonfiction at a much different level than we approach fiction or poetry or drama: that there's almost no room for metaphor. We expect the "I" in any nonfiction text to be an autobiographical "I" when there is a history in the essay of the "I" being a persona.
The point of the essay is to change things.
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy
Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay, you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language but in their behavior as well.
I remember, at MIT, we had to write an essay about something mathematical that you do in your extra time. I basically wrote about how dance, to me, was geometry: it was all shapes.
An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.
The book was just something that came along after we played the Super Bowl and I wrote a little essay that went online. Then I had two or three weeks and I said, wow, that essay was pretty good. Maybe I'll try and write some other stuff. Writing about the depression, I just felt - you know, when you write a book like this, you have to open up your life. You have to be willing to do so to a certain degree.
I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.
I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.
What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative.
My medium is prose, not the novel.
Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.
I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.
I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.
I don't like writing essays or theory.
I try to write an essay every time I speak.
There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.
The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything
I did 'Hawa' to understand what ghosts and the supernatural are all about. I don't believe in them and wondered how I could essay a part in a project I don't necessarily understand.
Why did the 14-year old Mexican girl end up pregnant? Because her teacher told her to go do an essay.
