Quotes On How To Write An Essay

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. Why do we write?
"To make suffering endurable
To make evil intelligible
To make justice desirable
and . . . to make love possible

Roger Rosenblatt

#4. Life is an essay you yourself have to write, start to finish.

Mo

#5. To write the essay is to be haunted by our own lies. No story is the whole story. Everything we know is shadowed by what we've missed, forgotten, or been afraid to see.

Sallie Tisdale

#6. The best approach is to write a narrative, "slice of life" essay where you focus on a smaller incident, event or moment, and then expand the essay to share what you learned from it.

Janine Robinson

#7. 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.

#8. That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don't happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered.

Paul Auster

#9. 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

#10. I don't have the looks to compete at a bar, and I'm not that funny. So the last thing I want is to be in a situation where that's what I'm competing on. I'd rather be on OkCupid or Match, where I can write a 300-word essay about myself that's really good.

Sam Yagan

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. The true purpose of illustrated journaling [is] to celebrate your life. No matter how small or mundane or redundant, each drawing and little essay you write to commemorate an event or an object or a place makes it all the more special.

Danny Gregory

#15. As Branford Marsalis said in a beautiful essay he write upon Clarence's death, C was blessed with 'the power of musical intent.

Bruce Springsteen

#16. We always give our best when our back is against the wall. We will write a superlative essay when pushing hard against a deadline, make the most innovative presentation when our job is in jeopardy, and study the hardest when the exam is the next day.

Twinkle Khanna

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. British writer G. K. Chesterton's reply to an invitation by the Times to write an essay on the subject "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton's response: Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely, G. K. Chesterton

Dale Carnegie

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. I thought I was going to write fiction but I fell backwards into non-fiction. It started when I got locked out of two apartments in one day and I told the story to some friends, one of whom worked in the 'Village Voice' and asked me to turn it into an essay.

Sloane Crosley

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.

Cynthia Ozick

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. I spend the rest of the night doing schoolwork. After striking a match and lighting a candal, I sit down at my desk with my quill pen and parchment to write an essay for my ethics class on the legalities of fan fiction.

Fanny Merkin

#31. To me, having 'material' for an essay means not only having something to write about but also having something interesting and original to say about whatever that might be.

Meghan Daum

#32. 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

#33. Harry moved the tip of his eagle-feather quill down the page, frowning as he looked for something that would help him write his essay, Witch Burning in the Fourteenth Century Was Completely Pointless - discuss.

J.K. Rowling

#34. Life is nothing more than a clean sheet of paper that most people use to write a dictation on, whereas only a select few ever use it to write their own essay.

Christopher Mart

#35. 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