"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Complete Prose Works Of Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"Claim whatever you want. Say you only want a happy family or a successful career or a big house. I say: no, that's not what you want. You'll settle for those things, but you really want a monkey that does your evil bidding. Pullman is a genius just for this."
— Maureen Johnson

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
— E.M. Forster

"A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself."
— Arthur Miller

"Conventions exist to be re-negociated"
— Anne Carson (The Matrix Review)

"Never say more than is necessary."
— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

"The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay."
— Richard Rodriguez

"[Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!"
— Anne Carson (Short Talks)

"The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult--to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization--not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their "product" not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their "success" something very much like Frost's momentary stay against confusion.""
— Mark Slouka

"It is, I think, the rarest of leisure, hard work mixed with hard pleasure, to refine one's time of deep thought or light regard into the utterly self-absorbed and equally and abundantly outward-seeking shape of the personal essay -- a story comprised of found fact, of analyzed emotion, of fictive memory."
— Barry Lopez (About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory)

"Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world. "
— Patricia Hampl

"Even ivory towers need central heating."
— Breyten Breytenbach

""A good essay is 10 inspiration, 15 perspiration and 75 desperation.""
— The people of Fanfiction