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'.

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

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

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

Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations.

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.

Hedonism can be a rational response to a difficult life.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.’

... 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.