Analytical Writing Quotes

I think one reason my books have found mainstream success is that they're written from a skeptical point of view.

I learned to write from different points of view and not just something I would say.

It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

I do a lot of readings.

Writing in form is a way of developing your thinking - your thinking along with the tradition. In a way, it's not you alone, it's you in partnership.

The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst was after Lomas said they were hedged: 'The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged financial institution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment.' I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.

I'm just a philosophical journalist, trying to describe what's going on. I want to stimulate conversations, and hope out of them will come truths.

I've never felt a need to really respond to someone else's writing.

I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting.

Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher.

What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay.

I don't like writing essays or theory.

Writing, for me, is an inherent part of understanding the material on a deeper level.

Brilliant opinion. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.

I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.

I see myself as a journalist reporting neglected stories about our past and trying to bring rigor, reason and intuition to the quest.

There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.

The analytical writer observes the reader as he is; accordingly, he makes his calculation, sets his machine to make the appropriate effect on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates his own reader; he does not imagine him as resting and dead, but lively and advancing toward him. He makes that which he had invented gradually take shape before the reader's eyes, or he tempts him to do the inventing for himself. He does not want to make a particular effect on him, but rather enters into a solemn relationship of innermost symphilosophy or sympoetry.

Writing lyrics is part spontaneous, intuitive and part really thought through and carefully analyzed as you write it. It's a mixture of two approaches, and I imagine writing anything is like that, really. Some of it just flows, and you just go with it.

Silk Road to Ruin has all the analysis and it's structured very well. I rely on my notes more and I use direct quotes. But there's nothing like writing about it right away.

An essay is not an op-ed that tells its reader what to think. An essay is a complicated working-out of one's own contradictions and complicities.

We like the John Gruber model - he writes some long stuff that's very thoughtful and analytical, and then other stuff, he just adds a bit of commentary. I like that.