Essays Quotes - Page 4

• 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.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Thinking, Selfishness, Needs

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• The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay.

  Robert Scholes

  Past, Play, Stories

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• The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates.

  Al Gore

  Long, Political, Age

  Saving the Constitution Speech at Constitution Hall, delivered 16 January 2006, Washington, D.C.

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• I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Character, People

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.66, Macmillan

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• The book was just something that came along after we played the Super Bowl and I wrote a little essay that went online. Then I had two or three weeks and I said, wow, that essay was pretty good. Maybe I'll try and write some other stuff. Writing about the depression, I just felt - you know, when you write a book like this, you have to open up your life. You have to be willing to do so to a certain degree.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Book, Writing, Two

  "Bruce Springsteen: On Jersey, Masculinity And Wishing To Be His Stage Persona". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. October 5, 2016.

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• 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.

  David Foster Wallace

  Character, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.nybooks.com

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• If these Essays were worthy of being judged, it might fall out, in my opinion, that they would not find much favour, either with common and vulgar minds, or with uncommon and eminent ones: the former would not find enough in them, the latter would find too much; they might manage to live somewhere in the middle region.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Fall, Mind, Favour

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• There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.

  Virginia Woolf

  Wine, Water, Literature

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.14, Oxford University Press

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• As a boy, I was ashamed to wear glasses. I memorized the eye chart, and then on the test they asked essay questions.

  Woody Allen

  Funny, Humor, Eye

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• I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay. I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness. Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.

  Alan Lightman

  Guiding Principles, Focus, Important

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

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

  Alan Lightman

  Population, Serious, Thinker

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

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• Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay.

  Ray Bradbury

  Night, Bed, Three

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• Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels are about. Sometimes you feel like certain novelists are like that.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Writing, Thinking, Novelists

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If one writing contributed more than any other to the framework in which this work Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions developed, it would be an essay entitled 'The Use of Knowledge in Society,' published in the American Economic Review of September 1945, and written by F. A. Hayek . . In this plain and apparently simple essay was a deeply penetrating insight into the way societies function and malfunction, and clues as to why they are so often and so profoundly misunderstood.

  Thomas Sowell

  Writing, Simple, Decision

  "Knowledge and Decisions". Book by Thomas Sowell, 1980.

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• Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

  Claudia Rankine

  Fall, Writing, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications.

  Meghan Daum

  Book, Done, Firsts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  Kate Christensen

  Book, Pay, Blogging

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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.

  Kate Christensen

  Writing, Voice, Ease

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Ingredients, Novel

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I try to be aware of what I'm concerned about, aware of how I feel about myself in the world, aware of how I feel about the issues of the day, but I guess I don't want to write essays in my head about my craft and maybe it's because I teach and talk about craft of other writers as a reader. I feel the moment I start doing that is when it's going to kill me.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Writing, Issues, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Writing, Cards, Enthusiastic

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• I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

  Julianna Baggott

  Writing, Plot, Want

  Interview with Roxane Gay, therumpus.net. May 11, 2012.

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• Like when you pick up a book and you don't realize what type of text it is - it could be an essay, a novel, a biography - and at one point you realize you don't know where, as a reader, you want to be. Where are you going with this text? What is the goal? How are you supposed to interpret what you're reading? And people's responses vary - some dislike it, and are put off by the confusion, the lack of comprehension.

  Sergio Chejfec

  Book, Reading, Goal

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others" essay was so hard to write because of the memories, the sensory stuff, but also because it didn't follow the form of any essay that I've ever read. And the truth that I was exploring necessitated that obliteration of traditional form, I think.

  Kiese Laymon

  Memories, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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

  Jerry Seinfeld

  Wells, Knows

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