Phillip Lopate Quotes

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'.

Hedonism can be a rational response to a difficult life.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator.

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

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

The dinner party is a suburban form of entertainment. Its spread in our big cities represents an insidious Fifth Column suburbanization of the metropolis.

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

Think of a dinner party as a club of revolutionaries, a technocratic elite whose social interactions that night are a dry run for some future takeover of the state.

I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.

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

I've had an enduring appreciation of psychology.

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.

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.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.— Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library