Top 100 Quotes About Essays
#1. I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like What I'm Going to be If I Grow Up
Lenny Bruce
#2. 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
#3. I verily believe that the kingdom of God advances more on spoken words than it does on essays written and read; on words, that is, in which the present feeling and thought of the teaching mind break into natural and forceful expression.
Richard Salter Storrs
#4. I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays.
Henry David Thoreau
#5. Doctrines, scriptures, sutras, essays, are not to be regarded as systems to be followed. They merely contribute to understanding. They should be for us a source of stimulation, and nothing more ... Adopted, rather than used as a stimulus, they are a hindrance
Wei Wu Wei
#6. Somewtimes I wrote random stuff in the middle of my essays, just to see if my teachers would say anything. No one ever did.
Kami Garcia
#7. Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.
David Herbert Donald
#8. I think my blog is fairly circumspect and elliptical. I've written personal essays, but they are short and to the point: in and out, and that's that.
Kate Christensen
#9. Some people desire to be famous. I probably wouldn't be very good at it.
Sarah Warman
#10. Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
Barbara Kingsolver
#11. For the average civilized person to whom, as to Patrick Henry, even death is acceptable in the absence of liberty.
Federico Mangahas
#12. Which meant I spent my spare time learning theory, studying dead languages and reading books like Essays on The Metaphysical by John "never saw a polysyllabic word he didn't like" Cartwright.
Ben Aaronovitch
#13. There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
A.S. Byatt
#14. Oftentimes, when people don't respond to text messages or emails, I just start writing long, long in-depth essays and diatribes where characters start to appear and narrative threads begin.
Lucas Neff
#15. Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
Nicholson Baker
#16. Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes.
Susan Sontag
#17. Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.
Margaret Fuller
#18. I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.
Jane Hirshfield
#19. The wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#20. One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.
Tobias Wolff
#21. I had been working on this series called 'Everything Dies,' and it was basically me doing non-fiction essays, responding to religion and stuff like that, and I really got into this ideas of telling factual stories via comics.
Box Brown
#22. I aspire to write what are called 'familiar essays.' They begin in the personal and end in the universal. It's not for me to say if I have been successful at it. But that is the hope.
David Rakoff
#23. When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#24. Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things.
Ross Douthat
#25. He stood and watched the night push itself into the bar and the light push it back out.
David Berman
#27. I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.
Laura Esquivel
#28. Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.
Aaron Belz
#29. I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
Reid Hoffman
#30. I began writing early - very, very early ... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
Wole Soyinka
#31. In a series of wonderful essays, Evan Handler gives himself up to us - warts and all. To our amusement and bemusement we share in his emotional growth as he struggles to mature. I not only laughed along with him but felt that I too had grown a little along the way. Who could ask for more?
Lewis Black
#32. Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.
Kate Christensen
#33. I'd written personal essays before, but never on this scale
never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen).
Ayelet Waldman
#34. Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable
Per Brinch Hansen
#35. I have not seen anywhere in the world a more obvious malformed person and miracle than myself. Through use and time we become conditioned to anything strange; but the more I become familiar with and know myself, the more my deformity amazes me and the less I understand myself.
Michel De Montaigne
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.
Joan Collins
#41. You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.
Anthony Bourdain
#42. Fourteen years in the professor dodge has taught me that one can argue ingeniously on behalf of any theory, applied to any piece of literature. This is rarely harmful, because normally no-one reads such essays.
Robert B. Parker
#43. At university level, I had an economics lecturer who used to joke that I was the only student who handed in essays on British Airways notepaper.
Sebastian Coe
#44. Certainly, it is heaven upon earth, to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.
Francis Bacon
#45. The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.
Chuck Klosterman
#46. I was mostly an indoor girl at university. Where other students did drama or music or sport alongside their degrees, I wrote. I used to work on essays and classwork during the day and 'The Bone Season' in the evenings.
Samantha Shannon
#47. 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
#48. In my new book, 'Binge,' I share essays about everything I've never told my viewers - touching on the best and worst days of my life, some hilarious, some embarrassing, but all extremely personal.
Tyler Oakley
#49. There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air.
Fran Lebowitz
#50. I had a book of essays out in 1997 in which I talked about the increasing virtuality of our lives. I've always been afraid of that in my own life.
Steven Heighton
#51. I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order
pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.
Kate Zambreno
#52. As far as I can tell, writing the essays didn't change the way I wrote poetry. Although the essays contain scattered passages that might be called lyrical, they often contain closed statements of what is only suggested in the poetry.
Pattiann Rogers
#53. If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.
Michel De Montaigne
#54. If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.
Don DeLillo
#55. I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it.
Diane Cilento
#56. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. - Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, Of Beauty
Scott Westerfeld
#57. Magic is a shortened term derived from "Magiano's tricks," coined from the exploits of the famous young charlatan, Magiano, who was never captured by the Inquisition. - Essays, by Raffaele Laurent Bessette Adelina
Marie Lu
#58. The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It's not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it's to challenge people, and it's to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things.
Meghan Daum
#59. A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.
William Hazlitt
#60. Perforated eardrums were quite common16, too; but, as Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, 'the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.
Bill Bryson
#61. For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.
Diablo Cody
#62. Maybe love is something we're meant to say casually and not regard as a prize from a treasure chest that a person earns.
Jen Glantz
#63. Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.
Joyce Carol Oates
#64. Most of the selected essays share a common thread: They describe how science happens.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#65. I used the phrases Jungian realism and linear archetypes, and congratulated myself on achieving a level of douchbaggery I had previously only witnessed in shampoo commercials for men.
Catherine Lowell
#66. Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
Dani Shapiro
#67. I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.
John D'Agata
#68. I'm not much a TV reporter, as in someone who covers the daily machinations of the television industry, though I certainly follow it and weave it into my reviews and essays about the medium.
Hank Stuever
#69. I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff.
Eileen Myles
#70. "So avoid using the word 'very' because it's lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don't use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won't do in your essays.
Tom Schulman
#71. READ. You have no business wanting to be a writer unless you are a reader. You should read fantasies and essays, biographies and poetry, fables and fairy tales. Read, read, read, read, read.
Kate DiCamillo
#72. I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.
Christopher Hitchens
#73. At first I was blogging everyday, but I don't do that anymore. It varies; sometimes I'll write these little essays and other times political commentaries. Other times it'll just be new work that I'm doing.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#74. For all the power of video and film, I am not giving up my pen. I am just much more likely to try to link essays to webcasts or videos. The best way for these two media to move forward, to inform and make change, is in tandem; together they are more than the sum of their parts.
Naomi Wolf
#75. For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.
Alice Walker
#76. Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.
Karl Kraus
#77. In 2013 there were 7,427 poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing. In April 1948, there were 15 readings in the United States, 12 by Robert Frost. So I claim. The figures are imaginary, but you get the point.
Donald Hall
#78. I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble.
Paul Theroux
#79. Mythology is about Good VS Evil, is it not? We can pretend runes and astrology and reading tea leaves ... But to whom do we pray when we are terrified? Carl Sagan's essays?
John Steakley
#80. I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays.
Oliver Sacks
#81. When it comes to the personal essays I write, I just convince myself that no one will ever read them.
Dani Shapiro
#82. 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
#83. I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.
John D'Agata
#85. Drama school is fundamentally practical. I didn't write any essays, so I came out with a BA honors degree in acting.
Emilia Clarke
#86. One of the essays, a particularly nasty one about Shrinking Potions, was for Harry's least favourite teacher, Professor Snape, who would be delighted to have an excuse to give Harry detention for a month. Harry
J.K. Rowling
#87. I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn't have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.
Chelsea Cain
#88. 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
#89. Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.
Marilynne Robinson
#90. People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. I don't think people think in essays; it's one exclamation point to another.
Tom Wolfe
#91. When I was younger, when I was at school, I did read a lot of fiction. I think as you get older perhaps you're interested in essays and biographies and things like that. I think it's just important to just read as much as you can.
Ronald Frame
#92. I don't understand how I can always want to sleep, hate waking up, and yet be afraid of death.
Mike Heil
#93. (Francis) Bacon's best known writings are his essays. They are loved for many reasons, such as their being so short.
Richard Armour
#94. I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.
Abigail Breslin
#95. There are only two living American authors fully deserving of the Nobel Prize. One is Lewis Mumford. The other is Wallace Stegner, whose novels and essays provide us a comprehensive portrait of industrial society in all its glittering corruption and radiant evil.
Edward Abbey
#96. The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make to them; a man may live long, yet get little from life. Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will - Montaigne, Essays
Michel De Montaigne
#97. The politics of the Essays preach a conservatism natural in one who aspired to rule. Bacon wants a strong central power. Monarchy is the best form of government; and usually the efficiency of a state varies with the concentration of power.
Will Durant
#98. I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#99. A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.
Tom Stoppard
#100. Walking out of an A level paper isn't funny."
"It's not that I'm laughing at."
"So what is it?"
"No one ever tells you when you're doing all that course work and revision and timed essays and study skills that it's an option."
"But it isn't an option."
"It is, because I just took it.
Rosamund Lupton
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