Essays Quotes: top 94 famous quotes about Essays

Essays Quotes & Sayings

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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

For the average civilized person to whom, as to Patrick Henry, even death is acceptable in the absence of liberty. — Federico Mangahas

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

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

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

You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese. — Anthony Bourdain

I don't understand how I can always want to sleep, hate waking up, and yet be afraid of death. — Mike Heil

I believe it was Gayelord Hauser, the nutritionist, who said, 'You are what you eat,' but if you happen to be an intellectual, you are what you quote. — Joseph Epstein

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake. — Leslie Fiedler

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

I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience. — Chris Abani

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

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

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

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

Hairwoman is torturing us with essays. Do English teachers spend their vacations dreaming up these things? — Laurie Halse Anderson

For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent. — Diablo Cody

He stood and watched the night push itself into the bar and the light push it back out. — David Berman

The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man. — Pico Iyer

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

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

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

I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart. — Taiye Selasi

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

I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

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

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

Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays. — Jill Lepore

When it comes to the personal essays I write, I just convince myself that no one will ever read them. — Dani Shapiro

Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story. — David Herbert Donald

I think - the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. — Jorge Luis Borges

I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff. — Abigail Breslin

... the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element ... — Derek Walcott

Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays. — E.B. White

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

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. - Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, Of Beauty — Scott Westerfeld

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

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

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

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

There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air. — Fran Lebowitz

I don't like writing essays or theory. — Adrian Mitchell

Because I have this thing about birthdays--they always remind me of death and forced jollity. — Alain De Botton

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays. — Nicholson Baker

I always did well on the essay questions. Just put everything you know on there, maybe you'll hit it. — Jerry Seinfeld

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

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

Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair. — Virginia Woolf

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions. — Margaret Fuller

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

Gazing from the moon, we see one earth, without borders, Mother Earth, her embrace encircling one people, humankind. — Frederick Glaysher

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

Most of the selected essays share a common thread: They describe how science happens. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel. — Kathleen Rooney

Essays in Zen Buddhism — Alan W. Watts

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

All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge. — Geoff Dyer

When life gives you twists and turns, Chique Yourself Up in Italy! — Barbara Conelli

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

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

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change. — John D'Agata

Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays. — Donald Hall

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

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

I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven. — Iain Banks

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays. — Karl Kraus

Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable — Per Brinch Hansen

Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it. — Clive James

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

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

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

Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life. — Arnold J. Toynbee

Single guys can easily simulate some of the joys of marriage simply by installing one of those GPS devices that use a woman's voice. — Barry Parham

REVENGE is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out. — Francis Bacon

Some people desire to be famous. I probably wouldn't be very good at it. — Sarah Warman

The essay is a modest genre. It doesn't mean to change the world. Instead it says: let me tell you what happened to me. — Sara Levine

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

Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous. — Rebecca Solnit

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

The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out. — Marilynne Robinson

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

I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays. — Oliver Sacks

I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble. — Paul Theroux

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger. — Barbara Kingsolver

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

[He who can describe how his heart is ablaze is burning on a small pyre] ~ Petrarch, Sonnet 137
(from Montaigne, On sadness) — Francesco Petrarca

Only where there is life can there be home. — Joyce Carol Oates

Drama school is fundamentally practical. I didn't write any essays, so I came out with a BA honors degree in acting. — Emilia Clarke

A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. — William Hazlitt

Youth must triumph ... now. Afterwards, it will be life. — Jose Garcia Villa

Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers ... that is a small population. — Alan Lightman

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

If I had even the slightest grasp upon my own faculties, I would not make essays, I would make decisions. — Michel De Montaigne