Top 67 Quotes About Essay Writing
#1. 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
#2. Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
Donna Tartt
#17. Why do we write?
"To make suffering endurable
To make evil intelligible
To make justice desirable
and . . . to make love possible
Roger Rosenblatt
#18. Do you know what every instructor in the world wants from you? He or she really, really wants you to do two things: Demonstrate that you have understood the course material and write intelligently about your subject.
Scribendi
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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.
#24. 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
#25. Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach.
Alexander Pope
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. I make them up,' I tell them. 'Out of my head.
Neil Gaiman
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. This one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing
Michael Chabon
#42. 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
#43. I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Alain De Botton
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay.
Rivers Cuomo
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Writing. Not writing. Twin Terrors. Putting one's mother into words ... It may have been easier to put her in her grave.
William H Gass
#54. Travel has a way of making the world a much smaller place.
Janna Graber
#55. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton
W. H. Auden
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.
Dan Savage
#61. Writing a long essay is probably the most complex constructive act that most human beings areever expected to perform.
Carl Bereiter
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading."
"On Despising Genres," essay
Ursula K. Le Guin
#66. 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
#67. How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
E. M. Forster
