Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator.

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.

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.

Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part.

Perhaps thought really is prayer.

I would never stay in office against the will of the people. My ethics and patriotism do not allow me to do so.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

I'm a citizen of the only righteous nation in the Universe-the Kingdom of Jesus Christ!

Grace is power as well as pardon.

Woe be to the generation that lets any higher faculty in its midst go unemployed.

Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.

So Ahmadinejad wants to be the first Iranian in space - wasn't he there just last week? 'Iran launches monkey into space.'

The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom and it was in the same fight that the United States lost 50,000 of its young men.