Quotes About Writing Essays

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

Per Brinch Hansen

#2. 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

#3. 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

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

Anne Fadiman

#5. 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

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

Jill Lepore

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

Adrian Mitchell

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

Josh Billings

#9. 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

#10. I don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.'

Tony Kushner

#11. I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.

Abigail Breslin

#12. For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.

Diablo Cody

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Harry Bauld

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

Don DeLillo

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#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'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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. (Francis) Bacon's best known writings are his essays. They are loved for many reasons, such as their being so short.

Richard Armour

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

Julianna Baggott

#50. 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