Essays Quotes

• The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

  Aldous Huxley

  Literature, Literary Devices, Devices

  Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker, James Sexton (2002). “Complete Essays: 1956-1963, and supplement, 1920-1948”, Ivan R. Dee Publisher

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  Funny, Thinking, Patterns

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• I don't like writing essays or theory.

  Adrian Mitchell

  Writing, Writing Essays, Theory

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• Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.

  David Herbert Donald

  Writing, Stories, Mystery

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• 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.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Fun, Book, Writing

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• When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Ambition, Creative

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The point of the essay is to change things.

  Edward Tufte

  Change, Things Change

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• Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, "Is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test?" ...Then a voice comes to me out of the dark and says, "We hate to tell you this but life is a thousand word essay.

  Charles M. Schulz

  Hate, Philosophy, Lying

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

  Margaret Fuller

  Mind, Criticism, Recluse

  Margaret Fuller, Joel Myerson (1978). “Margaret Fuller: Essays on American Life and Letters”, p.51, Rowman & Littlefield

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• A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Quality, Literature

  1925 The Common Reader, 'The Modern Essay'.

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• 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, Novelists, Essayists

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• I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

  Dylan Thomas

  Development, Lectures, Week

  Dylan Thomas, Paul Ferris (1985). “The collected letters”, Scribner

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

  Karl Kraus

  Writing, Literature, Aphorism

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write songs like, "What I'm going to do if I grow up".

  Lenny Bruce

  Education, Growing Up, Humorous

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• 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.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Writing, Projects, Aim

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• 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 Zedong

  Party, Writing, Chinese Revolution

  Mao Zedong (2017). “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (The Little Red Book) & Other Works”, p.13, Lulu.com

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• 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

  Moving, Islands, Rocks

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• 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.

  Writing, Names, Errors

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• To love is to believe, to hope, to know;
  'Tis an essay, a taste of Heaven below!

  Edmund Waller

  Life, Believe, Love Is

  Edmund Waller, Sir John Denham (1857). “The poetical works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham”, p.184

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• 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.

  Tony Hillerman

  Inspirational, Funny, Graduation

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• I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

  Alain de Botton

  Writing, Fiction, Uncomfortable

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing.

  Ryszard Kapuscinski

  Writing, Trying, Elements

  "An Interview with Ryszard Kapuscinski: Writing about Suffering". Interview With Thomas Wolfe, quod.lib.umich.edu. 1998.

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• The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Writing, Different, Prisms

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

  Donna Tartt

  Writing, Literature, Admire

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• One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case.

  James Payn

  Writing, Men, Thinking

  James Payn (1882). “Sammlung”

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