An Essay Quotes

#1. The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate.

Tony Kushner

#2. The difference between a story and an essay is that the storyteller just wants to entertain the reader, while the essayist has been to graduate school.

Dinty W. Moore

#3. Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.

Hallie Ephron

#4. An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

Cynthia Ozick

#5. There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.

Alberto Manguel

#6. To love is to believe, to hope, to know;
'Tis an essay, a taste of Heaven below!

Edmund Waller

#7. My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: 'Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say ... '
He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant.

Neil Gaiman

#8. British writer G. K. Chesterton's reply to an invitation by the Times to write an essay on the subject "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton's response: Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely, G. K. Chesterton

Dale Carnegie

#9. For TV you also get those pre-interviews when researchers ask you what you're going to say. The pre-interview drives me insane. If they've already decided the outcome, why don't I just hand in an essay? Maybe if we talk we'll find something out. I'd rather just have an awkward pause.

Jarvis Cocker

#10. Don't deliver an essay with so many points. No one can absorb it. Just say one thing ... Of course, you can say the point in many different ways over and over again with different illustrations.

Winston Churchill

#11. In high school, I won a prize for an essay on tuberculosis. When I got through writing the essay, I was sure I had the disease.

Constance Baker Motley

#12. Often kids in a computer lab learn about word-processing, but if they want to write an essay, they write it by hand. This is exactly the opposite of what you want them to learn. They're approaching the computer as just another abstract school subject.

Seymour Papert

#13. There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay ... the essay must be pure
pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.

Virginia Woolf

#14. I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.

Cynthia Ozick

#15. I thought I was going to write fiction but I fell backwards into non-fiction. It started when I got locked out of two apartments in one day and I told the story to some friends, one of whom worked in the 'Village Voice' and asked me to turn it into an essay.

Sloane Crosley

#16. An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.

John D'Agata

#17. All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood All partial Evil, universal Good. - ALEXANDER POPE, An Essay on Man

Thomas H. Cook

#18. Plutarch has written an essay on the benefits which a man may receive from his enemies; and among the good fruits of enmity, mentions this in particular, that by the reproaches which it casts upon us, we see the worst side of ourselves.

Joseph Addison

#19. My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I'm aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy.

Siri Hustvedt

#20. ...life is like an essay. Each day is a new draft- identify the strengths and build on them; identify the weaknesses and make them strengths. Then your life will get better and better.

Arthur Costa

#21. I found the structure of writing a screenplay harder than the structure of writing an essay. But it was definitely challenging to force myself to sit and write. I'm not used to having to force myself to work.

Judy Greer

#22. Each time I had an internship to do or an essay to write, I would always do it in the field of cinema. Nobody in my family worked in film and nobody could understand it.

Thomas Bidegain

#23. Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay.

Ray Bradbury

#24. When I was ten, I wrote an essay on what I would be when I grew up and said I would be a professional soccer player and a comedian in off season.

Will Ferrell

#25. My taking pictures means I'm taking a series of pictures which become an essay and then get extended into a book. That's what's exciting, to take an idea and work it through to completion.

George A Tice

#26. Today at school I wrote an essay about Flag Day which was so beautiful, but ever so beautiful - for I even used words without really knowing what they meant.

Clarice Lispector

#27. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton

W. H. Auden

#28. Mrs. Cheerson, our old teacher? She gave us an essay to write over the holiday. It was on To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read and it was good, and I think it's stupid to spoil a good book by writing an essay on it. So I didn't do it.

Jaclyn Moriarty

#29. In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.

Cynthia Ozick

#30. A lazy man works twice as hard. My mother told that to me, and now I say it to my kids. If you're writing an essay, keep it in the lines and in the margins so you don't have to do it over.

Gary Oldman

#31. I discovered Emerson's soporific qualities by falling asleep with my face in the book, drooling all over an essay called 'Self-Reliance' ...

Ransom Riggs

#32. Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.

Carl Andre

#33. I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.

Galen Rowell

#34. In high school I wrote an essay on baseball and my teacher told me I had to rewrite it on a more serious topic. So I wrote an essay about the World Series and my teacher gave up.

Tucker Elliot

#35. If you tell me, it's an essay. If you show me, it's a story.

Barbara Greene

#36. I don't want to see any art-writing gobbledygook or overblown words in an essay about me. If a smaller, simpler word will do - use it.

Doris McCarthy

#37. An Essay from Andy Weir: How Science Made Me a Writer I'm a nerd. Okay, a lot of people say that these days. But I really am. I was hired as a computer programmer for a national laboratory at age fifteen.

Andy Weir

#38. Writing an essay is like a school assignment: I have my topic, I organize my thoughts, and I write it. I have complete control over what I'm doing. Writing a novel is like setting out on a journey without knowing who or what I'll encounter, how long it's going to take, or where I'm going to end up.

Tawni O'Dell

#39. A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.

Jane Hirshfield

#40. Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be ... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made.

Morton Feldman

#41. I spend the rest of the night doing schoolwork. After striking a match and lighting a candal, I sit down at my desk with my quill pen and parchment to write an essay for my ethics class on the legalities of fan fiction.

Fanny Merkin

#42. To me, having 'material' for an essay means not only having something to write about but also having something interesting and original to say about whatever that might be.

Meghan Daum

#43. If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside.

Cynthia Ozick

#44. Why did the 14-year old Mexican girl end up pregnant? Because her teacher told her to go do an essay.

Carlos Mencia

#45. You have seven writers in your basement?"
Donald nods, signing, "They like it here. There's a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer ... They don't usually make much trouble.

Susan Wiggs

#46. I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.

George Steiner

#47. The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.

John D'Agata

#48. Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.

Sam Shepard

#49. You think an essay should have a hypothesis, a conclusion, should argue points. You really do bore me.

Carole Maso

#50. I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

Donna Tartt

#51. An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea.

Carol Bly

#52. Life is an essay you yourself have to write, start to finish.

Mo

#53. The Canadian-Australian mathematician Norman Wildberger has posted an essay arguing that real numbers are a joke.

Max Tegmark

#54. A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

Mao Tse-tung

#55. All this and the wine's coming in and out, and by the time the waiters set the espressos down Callan's about half in the bag. He watches Calabrese take a long sip from an espresso cup. Then the boss says, "Tell me why I shouldn't kill you."
One motherfuck of an essay question.

Don Winslow

#56. Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.

Lynne Truss

#57. It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions. All of which is to say: stories, too, are wild things.

David Wroblewski

#58. That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don't happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered.

Paul Auster

#59. An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.

Amy Hempel

#60. If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility.

Paul Graham

#61. Revolution is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly.

Mao Zedong

#62. I want to write an essay called "Fear of Mexico," because I always feel like Mexico's this lover that never writes to me.

Sandra Cisneros

#63. What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Barbara Kingsolver

#64. There are some readers who have never read an essay on taste; and if they take my advice they never will, for they can no more improve their taste by so doing than they could improve their appetite or digestion by studying a cookery-book.

Robert Southey

#65. History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.

James Ellroy

#66. She was supposed to be writing an essay on how geography had shaped the great battles of the past, but she was having trouble concentrating. In fact, all she'd managed so far was a title. How Geography Has Shaped the Great Battles of the Past.

Cinda Williams Chima

#67. One time, I was given an essay topic: to describe a perfect horse, whom the mere sight of the rider's whip would make obedient. I depicted this perfect horse throwing his rider at the sight of the whip.

Marquis De Lafayette

#68. Roy Blount is so funny, and he sounds like he's just talking, and the next thing you know he has tossed off
an essay as elegant and intricately structured as a birdsong. His ear for American speech is better than anybody's.

Ian Frazier

#69. One's politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about.

Thomas Mallon

#70. The merit of Locke's 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' is its adequacy, and not its consistency ... He should have widened the title of his book into 'An Essay Concerning Experience.

Alfred North Whitehead

#71. The essay I had to read was called, "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope.
The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in "heroic couplets". If something is called an essay, it should be an essay.

Maureen Johnson

#72. What triggers a poem for me is not the same as what triggers an essay. My mind is geared to looking for, or to watching out for, the image that attracts my attention or the phrase or the strange juxtaposition that strikes me bodily, or an odd question or supposition.

Pattiann Rogers

#73. I think my books are better than my exhibitions. If people don't like my books then I don't mind. I guess you like them enough to write an essay about them so that makes me pretty happy.

David Shrigley

#74. Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey.

Sloane Crosley

#75. While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.

John D'Agata

#76. Lucy: Our teacher wants us to write an essay on praying. Charlie Brown: Praying is important when you wake up at two o'clock in the morning feeling sick from eating something dumb the day before. Lucy: I'll just say we were out of town and I didn't have time to write anything.

Charles M. Schulz

#77. The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.

Stanley Fish

#78. Attempting to express a person's objective reality and subjective state of mind with the written word is an endless task because writing alters our perception of reality and amends our mental equilibrium.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#79. Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for. - Ann Patchett, from the essay The Sense of an Ending

Megan Hart

#80. But selfishness can take on many disguises. It can also be about defending and trying to prove your own belief system while denying there could be value in the beliefs of others.

Karlyle Tomms

#81. I love writing things down so pretty much every card I send to friends or family is an over enthusiastic essay. I've written some pretty good ones in my time.

Rae Morris

#82. And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.

George Orwell

#83. It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.

Angela Carter

#84. I would say that my great political awakening was really born on Okinawa, reading Albert Camus: the "Neither Victims nor Executioners" essay and The Rebel. I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I hated myself. I hated my life. I thought nobody wanted me.

Sam Hamill

#85. Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

Sophie Kinsella

#86. So I sat on the grimy floor of an eighteenth-century corn mill and watched my fiance heal the guy I loved.
"Wow," I muttered. "I'm gonna have one messed-up 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation' essay when I get back to Hex Hall.

Rachel Hawkins

#87. In the last essay he wrote before he died, great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis said, "We have no right to happiness; only an obligation to do our duty." Of course it is in our duty that happiness comes. Try it.

Billy Graham

#88. Writing about oneself is an egotistical adventure unless the act of self-exploration revolves around the distinct goal of heightening a person's cache of knowledge, ideas, and level of self-awareness.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#89. You don't really have to believe what you write in a blog for more than the moment when you're writing it. You don't bring the same solemnity that you would bring to an actual essay.

Nora Ephron

#90. in a short essay I wrote in 1991, Gardening As Agriculture. In that essay I asserted that gardening should be recognized as a serious and important form of agriculture that functions as an incubator for new farmers and farming methods.

Peter Bane

#91. Tessa reached for the words ... You know, in that essay of Donne's, what he says ... about how no man is an island. Everything you do touches others.

Cassandra Clare

#92. While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest.

Jane Yolen

#93. The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker.

Eula Biss

#94. Let what I here set down meet with correction or applause, it shall be of equal welcome and utility to me [...]And yet, always submitting to the authority of their
censure, which has an absolute power over me, I thus rashly venture at everything.

Michel De Montaigne

#95. Christopher Lynch has made the best and the first careful translation of Machiavelli's Art of War. With useful notes, an excellent introduction, an interpretive essay, glossary, and index, it is a treasure for readers of military history and Renaissance thought as well as for lovers of Machiavelli.

Harvey Mansfield

#96. Life is not a multiple choice test, it's an open-book essay exam.

Alan Blinder

#97. What I'm exploring right now is the subject of my own mortality. It's an area that I'm curious about, and I'm researching it to see if there's a photographic essay in it for me. If images don't start to come, I'll go to something else.

Leonard Nimoy

#98. To get the most attention, the essay should be wrong. Logical essays are read and understood. But an illogical or wrong essay will prompt dozens of other writers to rise and respond, thus giving the author mounds of publicity.

David Brooks

#99. Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach.

Alexander Pope

#100. In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, 'Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl'.

David Sedaris