Quotes

…[O]ne of the problems with the essay, as a form, is that everyone has written one. You can easily make your way through life without writing a novel or a poem, but it is hard to get out of high school without writing an essay. It thus becomes an unexalted endeavor. And yet strangely enough the essay is an outsider’s genre. Essays tend to be critical, subversive of something or another, even if it is just the latest fashion in sunglasses.

from Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd