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Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody. -- William Ernest Henley
I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist. -- Jose Saramago
It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French. -- John Jeremiah Sullivan
The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective. -- Manuel Puig
A young female essayist saying they're influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they're influenced by Joni Mitchell. -- Meghan Daum
In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays. -- Jose Saramago
It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I'd been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining. -- Meghan Daum
I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self. -- Walter Kirn
Christopher Hitchens, the late essayist and sot, was a man who purposefully cultivated a lot of friends of a certain type - rich, self-important, generally dim-witted and hence easy for a well-spoken Oxbridge debater to impress - and he electrified Washington D.C. society mainly by not being a completely charmless bore. -- Alex Pareene
Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable. -- William Ernest Henley
Christopher Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language. -- Christopher Buckley
Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature. -- William Rounseville Alger
I'm a woofer, not a tweeter; a writer, not a telegrapher; an essayist, not an aphorist. -- Richard Turner
Any essayist setting out on a frail apparatus of notings and jottings is a brave person. -- Diane Johnson
It is a curious fact that the word essayist showed up in English before it existed in French. -- John Jeremiah Sullivan
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The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. -- E. B. White
So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author.. reasoning poers must be brought to reinforce imagination. -- Flora Thompson
Every essay - the subject matter of every essay - is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world. -- Alan Lightman
I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas. -- Alan Lightman
The essayist . . . can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter - philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast. -- E. B. White
Though I later found a career as a journalist and an essayist, fiction is my first love and I never left it, even though there was no easy way to make a living from it. -- Andrew Lam
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