Many good poets are really essayists who write very short…

I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art…

— Wole Soyinka

I don't know if I have a book in me, but I'm sure I have more essays.

— Eden Robinson

I am far from any intention to limit curiosity, or confine the labours of learning to arts of immediate and necessary use. It is…

— Samuel Johnson

Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.

— David Herbert Donald

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction,…

— Jess Walter

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only…

— Tom Bissell

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…

— Sloane Crosley

Michael Jackson is an extremely productive ethnographer, a serious reader of phenomenological and existential philosophy, and a remarkable writer at a level that one…

— Arthur Kleinman

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its…

— Sharon Olds

I try to be aware of what I'm concerned about, aware of how I feel about myself in the world, aware of how I…

— Chang-Rae Lee

Yet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and say "You…

— John D'Agata

“I have not seen anywhere in the world a more obvious malformed person and miracle than myself. Through use and time we become conditioned…

— Michel de Montaigne

“Still less, despite appearances, will it have been a collection of three “essays” whose itinerary it would be time, after the fact, to recognize;…

— Jacques Derrida

The point of the essay is to change things.

— Edward Tufte

“Daimonology has no hierarchy, but only the spell of universal anarchy.”

— Carl William Brown