You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel. — Phillip Lopate Copy Share Image
Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience. — Phillip Lopate Copy Share Image
A personal essay often includes some or a lot of personal confession. That makes the reader feel less lonely in their confusion and darkness. — Phillip Lopate Copy Share Image
In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort. — Phillip Lopate Copy Share Image
Why am I attracted to all these lying quotes all of a sudden? Here’s another one. This one by Phillip Lopate: ‘(Children know it… — Phillip Lopate Copy Share Image
In the best nonfiction, it seems to me, you're always made aware that you are being engaged with a supple mind at work. The… — Phillip Lopate Copy Share Image
The dinner party is a suburban form of entertainment. Its spread in our big cities represents an insidious Fifth Column suburbanization of the metropolis. — Phillip Lopate Copy Share Image
“Fornicating is like parenting: no matter how you do it, you have the guilty sense that somewhere other people are doing it more correctly.” — Phillip Lopate Copy Share Image
“The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work than I can think of than taking… — Phillip Lopate Copy Share Image
I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a representation, to put it outside himself. A need to convert inner torment into some outward tangible wound that all could see. It was almost as though suicide were a last-ditch effort at exorcism, in… — Phillip Lopate Copy Share
Think of a dinner party as a club of revolutionaries, a technocratic elite whose social interactions that night are a dry run for some… — Phillip Lopate Copy Share Image
