Quotes About Essays

#1. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

Jess Walter

#2. My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha'am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha'am's essays.

Noam Chomsky

#3. In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.

John D'Agata

#4. From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.

Umberto Eco

#5. I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.

Sam Abell

#6. I hope these essays have been comforting to someone reading it if for no other reason than to watch me openly admit I have no idea what I'm doing. I suspect most people feel that way, even if they don't fess up.

Sara Bareilles

#7. I'm a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there's a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

Michael Connelly

#8. I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.

Chris Abani

#9. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

E.B. White

#10. To spend this particular year reading essays to Dennis Robertson as one's supervisor, and, simultaneously, enjoying membership of the group round Keynes was indeed an intellectual treat.

James Meade

#11. A critic named John Carter was so exercised by Wyatt's predilection for ripping out ancient interiors that he dubbed him "the Destroyer" and devoted 212 essays in the Gentleman's Magazine - essentially his whole career - to attacking Wyatt's style and character. At

Bill Bryson

#12. I have more than 100 legal pads filled with handwriting. Eight novels, two books for children, countless stories and essays.

Susan Straight

#13. The name [Spooky] comes from well back in university I was doing a series of essays and writing about Sigmund Freud's idea of the uncanny and I was really intrigued by this idea of "The Unheimlich".

DJ Spooky

#14. For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.

Meghan Daum

#15. People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays ... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley].

Charles Darwin

#16. In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.

Aaron Lazar

#17. I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.

Sloane Crosley

#18. Rarely has a collection of essays from a dozen scholars created a whole greater than the sum of its parts, but Capitalism Takes Command conveys with detail, coherence, and sophistication the changes in the American economy in the nineteenth century under the multiple imperatives of capitalism.

Joyce Appleby

#19. I truly believe that writing is a continuum - so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better. I don't write essays as often as I should.

Chris Abani

#20. In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

Jose Saramago

#21. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.

Ernest Hemingway,

#22. I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art.

Siri Hustvedt

#23. I'm an actor and a writer and a showrunner and I edit my show ... I have a job that three people usually have, and I have it in one person. And the idea that the critic thought that I had this excess of time for which I could go to, like, panels or write essays was just so laughable to me.

Mindy Kaling

#24. Ironically the blog has re-opened the essay as a good form for me. I like to look and make commentary! If I sense my essays are good, I try to resubmit to another place in pulp and several of them have been variously published in newspapers and magazines.

Stephen Vincent Benet

#25. If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.

Anne Fadiman

#26. Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays.

Donald Hall

#27. How do our philosophers act? Do they not inscribe their signatures to the very essays they write on the propriety of despising glory.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#28. I've determined the ideal job for me is one where I can write clever essays about my life and my employer will give me enough money not only to live a comfortable existence, but also to buy many, many new pairs of shoes.

Jen Lancaster

#29. A point of view, a single way of thinking that encompasses all elements of a subject, allows essays more or less to write themselves.

Stephen Fry

#30. Sometimes he thought his real goal wasn't to teach them to write better essays but to get them to think more about what it meant to be human.

Matthew Thomas

#31. I love writing essays and articles, so it's hard for me to resist taking assignments that inevitably pull me away from larger projects.

Meghan Daum

#32. I think people seem to want to read pieces that are shorter but not as short as the pieces they can read in small bites on the Internet. It may be that the sort of long essays are hitting a sweet spot between the tiny morsels online and the full-length book.

Meghan Daum

#33. I've published one book before, and now I'm writing a book of essays and stories about life in Tokyo. And I have one book coming out in May in Germany, about fitness.

Franka Potente

#34. 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

#35. The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.

Marilynne Robinson

#36. The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.

Chuck Klosterman

#37. Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.

Jill Lepore

#38. I'm not an impersonator. I've only got one voice and only do one guy and his first-person essays.

Tom Bodett

#39. Hairwoman is torturing us with essays. Do English teachers spend their vacations dreaming up these things?

Laurie Halse Anderson

#40. Book reviewing dates only to the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, there were so many books being printed that magazines - they were new, too - started printing essays about them.

Jill Lepore

#41. I don't think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it's enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities.

Joanna Scott

#42. I wanted to make a late-night-type show that happened to be in the morning for moms. Bravo was more interested in a blend of my books 'Momzillas' and 'Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut,' which is a collection of nonfiction essays.

Jill Kargman

#43. Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth.

Octavio Paz

#44. I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.

Taiye Selasi

#45. Essays just aren't my thing: no matter how hard I tried, it seemed I was always a bit average.

Danny Wallace

#46. Something outrageous, in the truest sense of the word, is always happening. On social networks, we're always voicing our reactions to these outrageous events. We read essays and 'think pieces' about these outrageous events. We comment on the commentary. We do this because we can.

Roxane Gay

#47. People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the 'Oxford bubble' because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays.

Samantha Shannon

#48. Shorter work - personal essays and book reviews - allow me to take a break from working on a book, which is good for the book and for its author.

Kathryn Harrison

#49. Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone's either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays.

Meghan Daum

#50. I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.

Iain Banks

#51. Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers ... that is a small population.

Alan Lightman

#52. I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting.

Tina Brown

#53. I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.

Sloane Crosley

#54. I could write another collection of personal essays from what has happened to me in the last year alone. I don't seek out my material - it finds me. I am magnetic, somehow.

Augusten Burroughs

#55. It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

Annie Dillard

#56. Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them - and us.

Nicholas Kristof

#57. Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labor equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal super-abundance.

Arthur Helps

#58. I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

George Eliot

#59. I don't like writing essays or theory.

Adrian Mitchell

#60. I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

Don DeLillo

#61. Writing is traveling through uncharted territory - your mind. You are the first traveler, and your essays are the world's first maps.

Harry Bauld

#62. 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

#63. Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.

Rebecca Solnit

#64. Seneca devoted much of his time to writing essays in praise of poverty, and in lending money at usurious rates.

Josh Billings

#65. For many years I have devoted articles and essays to newspapers, from the inside. So criticism of the newspapers was a topic that I practiced for a long time.

Umberto Eco

#66. Freedom and liberty, the essays we wrote on them, papers for our tutors, for grades, but did we know the value of those words which we bandied about, of how precious they are, as precious as the air we breathe, the water we drink.

Benazir Bhutto

#67. I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.

David Foster Wallace

#68. I am waiting impatiently for the day when beleaguered, like-minded academics can order James Wolcott's collected essays for their classes.

Camille Paglia

#69. Cummings' career as a writer - and a painter - was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten.

Billy Collins

#70. I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

Alan Lightman

#71. Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book.

Pattiann Rogers

#72. Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels are about. Sometimes you feel like certain novelists are like that.

Chang-rae Lee

#73. Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create ... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing?

Ernst Haas

#74. Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.

Arnold J. Toynbee

#75. Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

Kurt Vonnegut

#76. I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.

Siri Hustvedt

#77. Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

Kate Christensen

#78. Most people's major life changes don't come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed.

Aaron Swartz

#79. E.B. White's essays are the best things I've read about Maine - especially the one in which he's not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop.

Nicholson Baker

#80. The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays ... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.

Ray Bradbury

#81. Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon
the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination,
that all knowledge was but remembrance; so
Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is
but oblivion.
Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII

Jorge Luis Borges

#82. Literary generations come and go, and each generation passeth away and is heard of no more. In the end, simply the making itself - of poems and stories and essays - delivers the only reward a writer can be sure of. And, perhaps, the only one that matters.

Michael Dirda

#83. All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge.

Geoff Dyer

#84. My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.

James Wolcott

#85. If I had even the slightest grasp upon my own faculties, I would not make essays, I would make decisions.

Michel De Montaigne

#86. To me, cinema is cinema. Cinema is one big tree with many branches. The same as literature. In literature, you don't just say, 'Oh, I bought some literature.' No, you say, 'I bought a novel' by so-and-so, or a book of essays by so-and-so.

Jonas Mekas

#87. I had a professor in college who returned our graded essays, walked up to the chalkboard, and wrote in huge letters: "SO WHAT?" She threw the piece of chalk down and said, "Ask yourself that every time you turn in a piece of writing." It's a lesson I never forgot.

Austin Kleon

#88. Metaphorically these essays move as a quiet but observant coast-guard cutter among the rocks and islands up and down the littoral of our life.

David McCord

#89. Ultimately, whether we are writing posts, paragraphs, essays, arguments, memoirs, monographs or even just the Great American Tweet, writing is and should be a grand adventure.

Constance Hale

#90. There are often multiple sources for some famous statements by King; as a professional speaker and minister he used some significant phrases with only slight variation many times in his
essays, books, and his speeches to different audiences.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#91. I'm interested in so many different things and I'd like to cover a lot of territory. I'm trying to see my show as the Sunday 'Times.' You have the Arts & Leisure section, you have the Op-Ed page, you have the Book Review ... even the Style section has those wonderful essays about relationships.

Joy Behar

#92. Theological writing is usually done in essays or books, but I hope to show that if we concentrate on sentences, we may well learn something we might otherwise miss.

Stanley Hauerwas

#93. In addition, several marketing scholars, including Arvand Phatack and Rajan Chandron from Temple University and Roland Krapfel from the University of Maryland contributed essays.

Rachel Cooper

#94. Schoolchildren are asked to write essays on what William Blake thought about the Tiger; despite the fact that William Blake was a nutjob whose opinions, in a civilized society, would be of no interest to anybody apart from his parole officer.

Mark Forsyth

#95. The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

Tony Hillerman

#96. My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.

Ishmael Reed

#97. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates.

Al Gore

#98. One of the best essays I've seen in recent years was by a young woman who wrote about how being chosen to choreograph a high school musical forced her to assume a leadership role she wasn't sure she was ready for - but of course she was.

Kate Klise

#99. Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable

Per Brinch Hansen

#100. In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll's Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit.

Charlie Chaplin