Personal Essay Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay.

Robert Scholes

#4. 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

#5. I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.

Alain De Botton

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Genetic medicine is the ultimate reductionist fantasy.

T. Colin Campbell

#9. 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

#10. We're probably the opposite of the Osbournes. We run a very tight ship.

Hulk Hogan

#11. 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

#12. I think that mathematics can benefit by acknowledging that the creation of good models is just as important as proving deep theorems.

David Mumford

#13. If he wants to be my Peter Pan, I won't think twice about running away to Neverland or anywhere with him, just as long as it's far away from here.

Alexandria Bishop

#14. I can evaluate a player in a very short period of time because I'm very close to that game, very educated in that game and played the game for a long, long time. I wasn't just a guy with talent. I learned a lot about the game.

Kurt Russell

#15. The goal of the church is to bring the kingdom answers to the people

Sunday Adelaja

#16. 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

#17. 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