Most good essays are conversations with yourself - not just your decided thoughts but your dilemmas.
Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.
Hedonism can be a rational response to a difficult life.
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.
In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort.
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.