#essays

My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich. ↗

— James Wolcott

#high-school #like #mailer #norman #norman mailer

I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that. ↗

— Joan Collins

#class #composition #english #essays #first

The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself. ↗

— Chuck Klosterman

#basically #book #book writing #conscious #entertaining

To spend this particular year reading essays to Dennis Robertson as one's supervisor, and, simultaneously, enjoying membership of the group round Keynes was indeed an intellectual treat. ↗

— James Meade

#enjoying #essays #group #indeed #intellectual

Single guys can easily simulate some of the joys of marriage simply by installing one of those GPS devices that use a woman's voice. ↗

— Barry Parham

#humor #humor

Brighton Beach does not look, smell, or sound like Russia. It's a parody of Russia at best, something as different from the real thing as a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Yes, they sell Russian food on Brighton Beach, and Russian books and videos, and Russian clothes, and there are Russian restaurants and Russian nightclubs, and everybody speaks Russian, but the Russianness of the place is so concentrated that it feels ridiculously exaggerated. Everything Russian on Brighton Beach is too Russian, far more Russian than in real Russia. This is what happens all over Brooklyn. From the Scandinavians of Bay Ridge to the Chinese of Sunset Park, Brooklyn's immigrants go to ridiculous extremes to re-create their homelands only to end up with a vulgar pastiche. ↗

— Lara Vapnyar

#brooklyn-was-mine #essays #memoirs #food

A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. ↗

— William Hazlitt

#essays #great-men #greatness #men

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#essays #humor #inspirational #nature-writing #weasels

They must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened from looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with money or move a girl's heart. ↗

— W.B. Yeats

#essays-and-introductions #money