Writing An Essay Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

Donna Tartt

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach.

Alexander Pope

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton

W. H. Auden

#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. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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