Phillip Lopate Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Phillip Lopate's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Film critic Phillip Lopate's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 33 quotes on this page collected since November 16, 1943! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by Phillip Lopate: Essays Writing more...
  • 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'.

    Beach   Fun   Work  
    Phillip Lopate (2004). “Getting Personal: Selected Writings”, p.149, Basic Books
  • I am apt to be harsh in my secret judgments of others, seeing them as defective because they are not enough like me.

    Phillip Lopate (2004). “Getting Personal: Selected Writings”, p.143, Basic Books
  • 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.

    Pain   Teaching   Yield  
    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • ... 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.

    Phillip Lopate (1991). “Against Joie De Vivre”, Holiday House
  • Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.

    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a representation, to put it outside himself. A need to convert inner torment into some outward tangible wound that all could see. It was almost as though suicide were a last-ditch effort at exorcism, in which the person sacrificed his life in order that the devil inside might die.

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

    Shapes   My Family   Bent  
    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator.

    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • 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.

    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • Hedonism can be a rational response to a difficult life.

    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.

    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • 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.

    Mind   Twists   Plot  
    Phillip Lopate (2013). “To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction”, p.12, Simon and Schuster
  • A personal essay often includes some or a lot of personal confession. That makes the reader feel less lonely in their confusion and darkness.

    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort.

    Effort   Shadow   Needs  
    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • 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.

  • 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.

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

    Phillip Lopate (2004). “Getting Personal: Selected Writings”, p.143, Basic Books
  • 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.

    Running   Party   Night  
    Phillip Lopate (2004). “Getting Personal: Selected Writings”, p.146, Basic Books
  • 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.

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

    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • I'm fortunate in being able to find great satisfaction in my work.

    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience.

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

    Honesty   Conflict   Wit  
    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • 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.

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

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

    Party   Cities   Dinner  
    Phillip Lopate (2004). “Getting Personal: Selected Writings”, p.148, Basic Books
  • 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.’

    Children   Lying   Adults  
  • 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.

    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • Indeed, at times it's best to shut up.

    Shut Up  
    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
  • 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.

    Names   Brain   Example  
    Source: www.psychologytoday.com
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 33 quotes from the Film critic Phillip Lopate, starting from November 16, 1943! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Phillip Lopate quotes about: Essays Writing