I try to write things that can't be made into movies. My novels have thwarted many attempts to film them and I think that was true of the essay, too. If you'd actually tried to be true to the essay, it would have been, perhaps, boring. So taking that narrow little cast of characters and expanding it out, that was what was exciting about the project for me.
Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.
I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938.
Too much me is annoying under any circumstance, but too much me in an essay, however personal, would mar the art. My "character" in the essay is more like a perspective, an angle of vision, a complicating factor, a questioning presence. I don't sit on the sidelines or pretend to objectivity; and I'm not afraid to stick my neck out or to be revealing and vulnerable.
The essay form has superceded the novel as the vehicle that best suggests the prevailing apocalyptic gestalt, and as the talisman that is most able to repel the onset of paralysing dread.
The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.
In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.
I only performed a song so I could not write an essay. I just enjoyed being around bands, and around musicians, and, I didn't want to be the girl who followed the band around. I love singing, I love performing, but it's never been this goal.
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.
I wrote poems and an essay about that weird language. We still remember it to a certain extent, and it still comes up when we're all together. It's so fundamental to how I think.
My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ''Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say. . . '' He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant.
In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.
If you tell me, it's an essay. If you show me, it's a story.
I believe the personal essay is underrated for both writer and reader. It affords the writer great freedom: to speak personally yet invoke others' ideas, to be rational andor emotional, to be confident or admit doubt.
I had a really bad blushing problem when I was younger. The first time I ever performed was in an English class. I had an essay that I was supposed to write, and, instead of writing an essay, I wrote a song. So, I was playing this song in class, and I literally turned the color of this sweater that I was wearing, completely red. I think it was that feeling of challenging everything in me, my introverted personality. Like, "This is what you have to do. It doesn't matter if you do it wrong, you just have to do it. "
Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, "Is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test?". . . Then a voice comes to me out of the dark and says, "We hate to tell you this but life is a thousand word essay.
The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein.
I know The past and thence I will essay to glean A warning for the future, so that man May profit by his errors, and derive Experience from his folly; For, when the power of imparting joy Is equal to the will, the human soul Requires no other heaven.
Life is not a multiple choice test, it's an open-book essay exam.
I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading.
