Essay Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Life is nothing more than a clean sheet of paper that most people use to write a dictation on, whereas only a select few ever use it to write their own essay.

Christopher Mart

#5. The point of the essay is to change things.

Edward Tufte

#6. Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair.

Virginia Woolf

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

Carlos Mencia

#8. Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

#9. I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

#10. When I lead essay workshops, I ask students to come up with at least five topics, which they'll narrow down to one. The winning idea should be the story the student is most excited to tell because it honestly reflects his or her best self.

Kate Klise

#11. As women, we'd be exponentially lighter if we'd sort through some of our emotional clutter... We need to dispose of the crud that we no longer need. Excerpt from essay #3 "What's in my Purse?

Dianne Bright

#12. 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

#13. I don't have the looks to compete at a bar, and I'm not that funny. So the last thing I want is to be in a situation where that's what I'm competing on. I'd rather be on OkCupid or Match, where I can write a 300-word essay about myself that's really good.

Sam Yagan

#14. Life isn't like coursework, baby. It's one damn essay crisis after another.

Boris Johnson

#15. 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

#16. Get it? Gender is a country, a field of signifying roses you can walk through, or wear tucked behind your ear.

Eventually the flower wilts & you can pick another, or burn the field, or turn & run back across the tracks.

(from "Essay on the Theory of Motion")

Cameron Awkward-Rich

#17. When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckett
as told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett

Samuel Beckett

#18. In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.

Pankaj Mishra

#19. One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case.

James Payn

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

John D'Agata

#21. 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

#22. 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

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

Carole Maso

#24. The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.

Kathleen Rooney

#25. 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

#26. Henry David Thoreau is my favorite writer of all time, my literary god king, and his essay Wild Apples is my favorite thing to read.

Nicholas Trandahl

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

Donna Tartt

#28. A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

Virginia Woolf

#29. I wrote my senior essay on the Santa Fe Writer's Colony and my dissertation on sacred landscapes - the Grand Canyon, the Dakota Badlands. As a setting, I love the West. I just love that western landscape.

Elise Broach

#30. Why, in such a case, should the performer essay any sort of considered approach at all?

Brian Ferneyhough

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

Carol Bly

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

Mo

#33. The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

#34. For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.

C.S. Lewis

#35. For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.

Sam Shepard

#36. The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.

Aldous Huxley

#37. How could filling in a bunch of blanks and writing a fluffy essay about the 'moment of significance' in my life let them know if I was good enough to go here?

Laurie Halse Anderson

#38. In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

Stanley Kubrick

#39. A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.

Alan Ryan

#40. To write the essay is to be haunted by our own lies. No story is the whole story. Everything we know is shadowed by what we've missed, forgotten, or been afraid to see.

Sallie Tisdale

#41. I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

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

Max Tegmark

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. The essay form has superceded the novel as the vehicle that best suggests the prevailing apocalyptic gestalt, and as the talisman that is most able to repel the onset of paralysing dread.

Adam Parfrey

#47. In essay writing, I'm trying to push the form of expository writing. I'm trying to remember, trying to reckon, trying to find connections with the world, the nation and me, but I'm always trying to push the form, too, without being too obvious that I'm trying to push the form.

Kiese Laymon

#48. There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy.

Eula Biss

#49. The best approach is to write a narrative, "slice of life" essay where you focus on a smaller incident, event or moment, and then expand the essay to share what you learned from it.

Janine Robinson

#50. The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein.

Karl Shapiro

#51. The tagline at Westin hotels is that they strive to surprise and delight their guests. This is exactly what a college essay should do.

Kate Klise

#52. The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you're comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured.

Anne Fadiman

#53. Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

Chris Abani

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

Alan Blinder

#55. 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

#56. The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.

Herbert Spencer

#57. I kind of got more interested in writing after I turned in my last college essay and nobody was going to tell me what kind of academic papers to write anymore. I could write whatever I wanted, and I realized that I actually liked it when I could choose what I would write.

Dan Millman

#58. I'm most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page ... sunrise over the desert and masses of ... a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

Anthony Hopkins

#59. Basically, I think of fiction and non-fiction as different ways of engaging with the world. You reach a point where you feel you have said all you possibly can, in reportage or a review essay or a reflection on history, which 'From the Ruins of Empire' was.

Pankaj Mishra

#60. I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.

John D'Agata

#61. 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

#62. The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.

Richard Rodriguez

#63. 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

#64. The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd.

Albert Camus

#65. History begins in novel and ends in essay.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#66. Every essay - the subject matter of every essay - is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.

Alan Lightman

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

Sloane Crosley

#68. The reason for writing that essay was less a personal agenda than an attempt to explain my unease with the general label of "immigrant literature" after I had read quite a number of reviews (in different countries) involving books written by 'immigrants.'

Sasa Stanisic

#69. Sometimes Carrot sounded like a civics essay written by a stunned choirboy.

Terry Pratchett

#70. 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

#71. I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

Alexander Chee

#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. For a generous deed lives longer than a great battle or a king's decree of a scholar's essay, because it spreads and leaves its mark on all nature and endures through many generations.

L. Frank Baum

#74. This is very creative, said Mrs. Fretag, and she began to read my essay. The words sounded good to me. Everybody was listening. My words filled the room, from blackboard to blackboard, they hit the ceiling and bounced off, they covered Mrs. Fretag's shoes and piled up on the floor.

Charles Bukowski

#75. Becoming a footballer is only the first half of the silent prayer a kid offers up to the sky or confides to his teacher in a primary school essay. The second part is the name of the team he wants to play for.

Andrea Pirlo

#76. A photo essay (otherwise known as a fucking slide show)...

Caroline Kepnes

#77. 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

#78. The essay is a modest genre. It doesn't mean to change the world. Instead it says: let me tell you what happened to me.

Sara Levine

#79. We always give our best when our back is against the wall. We will write a superlative essay when pushing hard against a deadline, make the most innovative presentation when our job is in jeopardy, and study the hardest when the exam is the next day.

Twinkle Khanna

#80. As Branford Marsalis said in a beautiful essay he write upon Clarence's death, C was blessed with 'the power of musical intent.

Bruce Springsteen

#81. 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

#82. The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy

Theodor Adorno

#83. The true purpose of illustrated journaling [is] to celebrate your life. No matter how small or mundane or redundant, each drawing and little essay you write to commemorate an event or an object or a place makes it all the more special.

Danny Gregory

#84. 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

#85. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical.
("How to Write with Style". Essay, 1985)

Kurt Vonnegut

#86. I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

#87. Not so much a film as a visual essay, exquisitely directed and photographed (by Sacha Vierny) ... Difficult to watch but well worthwhile for those willing to be challenged.

Leonard Maltin

#88. 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

#89. The "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others" essay was so hard to write because of the memories, the sensory stuff, but also because it didn't follow the form of any essay that I've ever read. And the truth that I was exploring necessitated that obliteration of traditional form, I think.

Kiese Laymon

#90. 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

#91. 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

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

Amy Hempel

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. I'd always try to get a C, maybe a B. Other girls would trot off a brilliant essay and go off to Oxford; I'd think: 'Where is the justice?' I took A-levels in English, history and theatre studies and got three Bs.

Romola Garai

#96. In a British University, a final exam question on Business was:
"Define what risk is".
The shortest answer ever at one word was :
"This."
The student handed the essay in and got 100%.

Anonymous

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.

Matthew Pearl

#100. God offers to every mind a choice between repose and truth. take which you please
you can never have both. [Essay on Intellect]

Ralph Waldo Emerson