Top 66 Essays Quotes

I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.

We might enjoy essays, TED talks, and even Facebook posts bemoaning our dependency on tech, but judging by our enthusiastic adoption of these services, we’re all in.

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I’m a writer… I write poetry and essays and criticism and I’d love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

I think, one day, I might actually try writing a bunch of – a collection of essays maybe on the funnier side of the spectrum. I don’t know. But it’s fun to have, frankly, Twitter as kind of an outlet. When you‘re writing about dark things all day, it’s kind of fun to have fun.

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture – I’d write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.

People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that’s the way people think. I don’t think people think in essays; it’s one exclamation point to another.

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

When topics are complex and meaty, don’t create a never-ending email thread. It’s amazing how much time people waste composing and reading carefully-worded essays, when a 5 minute in-person chat would resolve the whole thing.

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.

Ralph Ellison’s essays were models for me when I began my life as a critic. Slipping cultural yokes and violating aesthetic boundaries, he made criticism high-stakes work, especially for a black critic.

In the early 60s, you read your essays to your supervisor rather than hand them in. I was both lazy and clever, and realised I didn’t need to write essays at all, I could simply talk with some notes in front of me.

When I was at university, I did essays on political theatre. And it was really frustrating that the ideas weren’t reaching the people they were talking about. Standup is the one place where you are talking to every level of society.

I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I’ve always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.

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.

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

I grew up in Nagpur, and I first started enjoying the author Harishankar Parsai. He wrote mostly satire, essays on the current situation and social issues. He wrote many books and I think he was my first influence.

I had been working on this series called ‘Everything Dies,’ and it was basically me doing non-fiction essays, responding to religion and stuff like that, and I really got into this ideas of telling factual stories via comics.

I’m interested in so many different things and I’d like to cover a lot of territory. I’m trying to see my show as the Sunday ‘Times.’ You have the Arts & Leisure section, you have the Op-Ed page, you have the Book Review… even the Style section has those wonderful essays about relationships.

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.

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.

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.

Indeed, ‘The Second Plane‘ is such a weak, risible, and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction and literary criticism, as he’s thoroughly discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or social commentator.

Stanford‘s law school application wasn’t the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren’t a loser.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers – encouraging them to die.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

I don’t like writing essays or theory.

When I was in high school, I used to beg my teachers to let me create films and plays instead of writing essays. I think they were at least happy I was excited about school.

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

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.

I believe that one reason I began writing essays – a form without a form, until you make it – was this: you didn’t have to borrow from an emotionally and visually upsetting past, as one did in fiction, apparently, to write your story.

I love Richard Thaler’s ‘Quasi Rational Economics.’ A collection of some of his most interesting and inventive essays, the real foundation of behavioral economics.

People aren’t coming to me looking for political essays or polemic – they’re looking for a rattling good story.

In my new book, ‘Binge,’ I share essays about everything I’ve never told my viewers – touching on the best and worst days of my life, some hilarious, some embarrassing, but all extremely personal.

When you go back and look at what people say about my essays, they’re always going, ‘What is this?’ Because they’re not exactly like other people’s essays… The approach is not at all the recognized approach of a non-fiction writer. It’s not linear. It isn’t pyramidally based on fact.

I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in ‘The Summer without Men.’ I also write essays about visual art.

Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them – and us.

I don’t think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it’s enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities.

I don’t believe in writing for goals, or else I’d write essays.

People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the ‘Oxford bubble‘ because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays.

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

To me, cinema is cinema. Cinema is one big tree with many branches. The same as literature. In literature, you don’t just say, ‘Oh, I bought some literature.’ No, you say, ‘I bought a novel’ by so-and-so, or a book of essays by so-and-so.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother‘s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

I’m not an impersonator. I’ve only got one voice and only do one guy and his first-person essays.

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

I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.

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.

I wrote a book of essays about New York called ‘The Colossus of New York,’ but it’s not about – you know, when I’m writing about rush hour or Central Park, it’s not a black Central Park, it’s just Central Park, and it’s not a black rush hour, it’s just rush hour.

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

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

I think I got into travelling because it was so not in my blood, so against my tendency to just stay put because my dad just hated going on holidays, because, as I’ve said in many essays, the thing that he hated more than anything else in life was spending money. And as soon as you leave your home, you’re spending money.

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

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.

I started writing when I was in school. I wrote essays and in my teen years I used to write sorrowful sad stories and poems as you do at the age.

Amartya Sen is best known to the general reader for his powerful essays on famine. He is an optimist about some of our gravest economic problems, such as mass starvation in a world that at present can easily produce more food than everyone can eat. Reason and voluntary participation are his watchwords.

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

Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I’m attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.

I aspire to write what are called ‘familiar essays.’ They begin in the personal and end in the universal. It’s not for me to say if I have been successful at it. But that is the hope.

When I was a kid, they made us write these essays about what Heaven would be like. I went to this Christian school in Texas, and the thing that I wrote was no bees. No bees. No mud. No infirmities.

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.

I chose to be a maths teacher because I thought the marking would be easy. You’d just tick and cross, whereas if you’re an English teacher, you’ve got to read essays. Then they said I had to analyse the methodology. It takes an eternity, it’s insane!

Something outrageous, in the truest sense of the word, is always happening. On social networks, we’re always voicing our reactions to these outrageous events. We read essays and ‘think pieces‘ about these outrageous events. We comment on the commentary. We do this because we can.

I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

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.

To spend this particular year reading essays to Dennis Robertson as one’s supervisor, and, simultaneously, enjoying membership of the group round Keynes was indeed an intellectual treat.