Top 100 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. 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
#4. 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
#5. You have to make choices even when there is nothing to choose from.
Peter Zilahy
#6. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
Virginia Woolf
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Her essay about the wedding ring was short. Kerr wrote: "Things are just things - they have no power to hurt or to heal. Only people can do that. And we can all choose whether to be hurt or healed by the people who love us."
That was all.
And that was everything.
Jack Canfield
#10. In his essay, 'Perpetual Peace,' the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.
Henry Kissinger
#11. I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.
Meghan Daum
#12. As a boy, I was ashamed to wear glasses. I memorized the eye chart, and then on the test they asked essay questions.
Woody Allen
#13. [Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let's buy it what a bargain!
Anne Carson
#14. 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
#15. This one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing
Michael Chabon
#16. To love is to believe, to hope, to know;
'Tis an essay, a taste of Heaven below!
Edmund Waller
#17. It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim
Jason Najum
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. It's not that I haven't had a good life. It's that I hadn't allowed myself to live a great one.
- from the essay Dear Someone, Amazed.
Joanne Crisner Alcayaga
#21. You love tests?"
"Well, yeah. There are questions and answers. True or false, multiple choice, essay. What's not to love?
Nora Roberts
#22. After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree.
Jason Najum
#23. It takes me forever to actually finish something like a ten-page essay. But, when I do, I usually love what they are. It's a complicated relationship.
Chris Abani
#24. You can provide a short-format content, and it can grow, and it can spread virally across the entire Twitter system, and it can contain within it a link to something that's much longer, that's a long essay or that's a video.
Biz Stone
#25. I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Alain De Botton
#26. As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.
John D'Agata
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Yet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and say "You don't belong here. That's not how we do things." I think that's problematic.
John D'Agata
#33. I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.
Dylan Thomas
#34. And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.
George Orwell
#35. Today I acquired a collection of ray guns, posed for a cover spread, and wrote four thousand words of essay, including a reminder for my readers to avoid that terrible gallery show. What have you done?"
"Science," Drake said, annoyance shadowing his face as he crossed to the bar.
Michael R. Underwood
#36. Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.
Lee Gutkind
#37. 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
#38. I avoided one-on-one situations, eye contact, and healthy relationships. Instead I took refuge in drinking too much, cheap sex, and sarcasm.
Jason Najum
#39. 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
#40. Life wanted faces that would express what we wanted to tell. Not just the unusual or striking face, but the face that would speak out the message from the printed page. I am always looking for some typical person or face that will tie the picture essay together in a human way.
Margaret Bourke-White
#41.
And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time
George Orwell
#42. I inherited Mom's verbal skills, and participated in forensics and essay contests in elementary school - and won every essay contest I ever entered.
Joel Salatin
#43. 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
#44. When it comes to the college essay, feel free to break some rules. Many still apply, of course: you need to watch your grammar and spell everything correctly. Sentence structure still matters. But the formula that got you A's in English can be a straitjacket when you're writing your college essay.
Cassie Nichols
#45. To the student I would say, Life is principally multiple choice, but at the end there's a tough essay question.
Robert Breault
#46. What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay.
Rivers Cuomo
#47. J. B. Jackson, a historian of landscapes, makes a crucial point about such things in his essay "The Necessity for Ruins." Things in decay, he says, express a theology of birth, death, and redemption.
Thomas Moore
#48. Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.
G.K. Chesterton
#49. Genres have a history and impose a historical character upon the writer. What is interesting in the poem involves a certain kind of dramatization of the self that you don't have to engage in in the essay. In fact, the essay is a more social medium than the poem.
Vijay Seshadri
#50. Too bad relationships weren't math problems with precise answers. They were essay questions in a philosophy class, and they came down to judgement.
Lauren Blakely
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. She'd been accepted to the one school she'd applied to, early, for no other reason than that she'd loved the oddball essay questions in the application. How such small things can decide one's fate.
Lauren Groff
#57. What I think is important about essayists - about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view - is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way.
Meghan Daum
#58. The word 'essay' comes from a root meaning 'trial' or 'attempt',
Gavin Francis
#59. 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
#60. An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.
John D'Agata
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. I wasn't particularly good at school so always found essay writing hard, so I didn't do that well at English or history, even though I enjoyed it.
Ruby Bentall
#64. 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
#65. I share my life experiences as a poet with my students. My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries. If I read a new poem or essay or book I'm excited about, I bring it in.
Dorianne Laux
#66. he took political sketch-writing to a new level, invented sports commentary as we know it, and created the essay-form as practised by Clive James, Gore Vidal, and Michael Foot.
Duncan Wu
#67. 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
#68. ...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
#69. And in his third essay Herodius (not Herodotus, a mistaken pronunciation, perhaps) said 'We can contend with the evil that men do in the name of evil, but heaven protect us from what they do in the name of good.'
Richard Boone
#70. 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
#71. The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing.
Paul Di Filippo
#72. 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
#73. Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay.
Ray Bradbury
#74. 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
#75. Travel has a way of making the world a much smaller place.
Janna Graber
#76. 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
#77. They are a great essay in male friendship, which has gone now. Men's friendship has been debased. One of the lovely things about Holmes and Watson is that they do have this great platonic relationship.
Jeremy Brett
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. I'm interested in directing movies about situations that I've lived, so they are almost a personal essay about what I've come to believe in.
Jodie Foster
#81. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton
W. H. Auden
#82. At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.
Wilbur Smith
#83. I didn't really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.
Joel Salatin
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#88. No, I don't work here, I'm taking pictures of messy bathrooms for a photo essay on the American West. But I'm always up for clean, so if you want to pitch in, I've got Pine Sol and a sponge in my car ... It's that VW microbus parked next to the dumpster, and you don't need a key, just pull hard.
Pansy Schneider-Horst
#89. Our family was nearly torn apart on several occasions by arguments started when the refrigerator door was open for what my father deemed as 'too long.
Wes Locher
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. In my own little way, I feel like I'm part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay forward.
David Shields
#94. Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first City ... Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.
Anatole France
#95. Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.
Jess Row
#96. I thank my mother (Ma, you're only second cause you got the dedication), who used to make me write essays whenever I got into trouble, explaining exactly what I'd done and why I'd done it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#97. 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
#99. It is while prone that ideas come. "A writer could get more ideas for his articles or his novels in this posture than he could by sitting doggedly before his desk morning and afternoon," writes Lin Yutang in his essay "On Lying in Bed.
Tom Hodgkinson
#100. Wifehood and motherhood ... are a bigger handicap than the average male genius would ... essay to carry to success.
Marie Pitt
