Essays Quotes

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

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

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

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

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

[George] Orwell's essays. It's got it all. Great writing, a worldview that I find interesting and useful, and most of it timelessly true.

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.

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).

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

I have lots of fiction in the drawer, but the essays I mostly kick out into the world, ready or not. Fiction incubates differently, I suppose.

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.

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.

I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.

For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.

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".

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

I don't know if I have a book in me, but I'm sure I have more essays.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.

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

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.

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

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.

If you were an actor, anybody could go on Broadway and take a George Carlin hour and do it on stage as a one man show. They're all stand alone essays.

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

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.

If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur.

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.

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.

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.

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

I love James Baldwin essays, but also his novels. I recently read "Another Country." I couldn't believe how ahead of his time he was.

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.

How do our philosophers act? Do they not inscribe their signatures to the very essays they write on the propriety of despising glory.

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

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.

While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.

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

E.B. White's essays are the best things I've read about Maine - especially the one in which he's not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop.

Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book...

Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.

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.

I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.

I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.

I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.