Essays Quotes

I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.

One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

Only where there is life can there be home.

Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them

Forget it. Never explain

Some writers write to forget. Some forget to write.

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.

The hopeless hope is what sustains us in difficult moments

Christianity and communism cannot be reconciled

Let us give Nature a chance

He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods

I don't understand how I can always want to sleep, hate waking up, and yet be afraid of death.

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists

Gazing from the moon, we see one earth, without borders, Mother Earth, her embrace encircling one people, humankind.

No man is exempt from saying silly things

When life gives you twists and turns, Chique Yourself Up in Italy!

A writer is not born but made through study and sheer willpower and ability to embrace beauty and agony.

Storytelling creates a healing serum. The thematic unguent of our personal story represents a fusion of the ineffable truths that each of us must discover within ourselves.

The objections to religion are of two sorts -- intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true

Truth is the summit of being

Youth must triumph... now. Afterwards, it will be life.

Concepts are not real things

Make a better mousetrap and the world will know it

Maybe love is something we’re meant to say casually and not regard as a prize from a treasure chest that a person earns.

As for dying we can only assay that once

A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition

When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign

I think—the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center.

I have more than 100 legal pads filled with handwriting. Eight novels, two books for children, countless stories and essays.