Phillip Lopate Quotes

Most good essays are conversations with yourself - not just your decided thoughts but your dilemmas.

I've had an enduring appreciation of psychology.

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 which the person sacrificed his life in order that the devil inside might die.

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 better than adults) that in telling a lie, fidelity is everything.’

Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator.

For most of my life, I have wanted broad impact but now, at 72, I'm not so sure that's always my first priority.

... I vowed that I would always respect the right of an individual to kill himself. Whether suicide was a moral or immoral act I no longer felt sure, but of the dignity of its intransigence I was convinced.

Indeed, at times it's best to shut up.

Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience.

The essay must be artistically rendered: You must keep the reader engaged, whether with wit, conflict, mischief, and/or yes, with honesty.

My other work, teaching, also is satisfying because I can be with people but in controlled circumstances, which aren't as likely to yield the pain of dealing with family.

In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort.

The trick is to realize that one is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.

If someone in my family is getting emotionally bent out of shape, I've had to learn to adapt.

You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.

The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.

I really do like to write and when I'm not, I think, "Okay, I'll be a good citizen now" but fact is, that's secondary.

Domesticity has been a challenge for me but painful as it's been, engaging with family has been a school for reducing solipsism and increasing my understanding of people's different reactions to stress.

The knowledge that my discriminations are skewed and not always universally desirable doesn't stop me in the least from making them.

A personal essay often includes some or a lot of personal confession. That makes the reader feel less lonely in their confusion and darkness.

My wife and daughter have accused me of being too silent at breakfast but I don't want to talk when I don't have much to say.

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 story line or plot in nonfiction consists of the twists and turns of a thought process working itself out.

Hedonism can be a rational response to a difficult life.

Doubt is my boon companion, the faithful St. Bernard ever at my side. Whether writing essays or just going about daily life, I am constantly second-guessing myself. My mind is filled with 'yes, buts,' 'so whats?' and other skeptical rejoinders. I am forever monitoring myself for traces of folly, insensitivity, arrogance, false humility, cruelty, stupidity, immaturity and, guess what, I keep finding examples. Age has not made me wiser, except maybe in retrospect.

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

I'm fortunate in being able to find great satisfaction in my work.

Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.

The essay is a wonderful medium. I might mention that some writers who longed to be novelists were better as essayists: Sontag, Baldwin, Vidal, Mary McCarthy, Mailer.

I am apt to be harsh in my secret judgments of others, seeing them as defective because they are not enough like me.

I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations.

It bothers me when I can't, for example, remember a name. I don't know if it's pre-senility or whether there are too many names packed in our brains.