Top 302 Essays Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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.

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

I don't like writing essays or theory.

When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.

Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays

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.

I didn't really have a major role in how it was described. I wanted it to be a collection of essays where each storyline could be contained.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The interesting thing about that is one of the greatest critics of socialism and leftwing writings was Robert Michels who wrote a series of essays called "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" and in these essays he discusses how no matter what sorts of freedoms are advertised or put into a society structure, that all societies, all form of governments - whether they be a Roman republic, whether they be a democracy, whether they be a Russian communist system, whatever, a tribe... a tribal council - all of the continuously, throughout the ages, have all converted back into an oligarchy.

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

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.

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.

I got to take classes in writing with a fountain pen, and actually, something you make is your own textbook. So, while you're learning about something, you have to write essays on it, and then you handwrite in cursive, in fountain pen, your essays out on beautiful paper and you bind it together into a book that you hand in at the end of the course.

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

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.

As far as I can tell, writing the essays didn't change the way I wrote poetry. Although the essays contain scattered passages that might be called lyrical, they often contain closed statements of what is only suggested in the poetry.

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

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.

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

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

The Restless Anthropologist is a rich, powerful, and compulsively readable collection of essays by anthropologists who look back at the multiple relationships between their serial fieldwork experiences and their lives. Illustrating the dense interweaving of the personal and the professional that is the hallmark of anthropology as a vocation, these essays are at once affectively deep reflections, and clear-eyed assessments, of lives often lived 'between here and there.' Alma Gottlieb's idea to stimulate these articles and bring together this collection was inspired.

I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.

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

Each of the essays in this volume ranges widely across technical and philosophical domains. They examine both familiar automatons from throughout history and delight us with yet more that will likely be unfamiliar to most readers. But the real treat of the essays is how they will make Artificial Life researchers squirm as they recognize their own intellectual sleights of hand exposed for all to see. Those researchers and the Genesis Redux contributors are all ultimately interested in what it is that truly distinguishes us beings from other lumps of matter.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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

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

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

[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 love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting

Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable

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.

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

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

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.

I wouldn't be making films if I just wanted to express some specific ideas; then I would be writing essays or something.

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.

I enjoy writing personal essays in the way of Charles Lamb because it goes back to the school days when I was good in writing essays.

I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.

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

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

I think those women who get themselves to write essays, it's not an easy thing to do because as women, you're not encouraged to think; you're encouraged to feel. This is a broad, broad statement. So I think those women who go out on a limb and publish essays are highly conscious of how they are writing their opinions.

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

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

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

I'm really into short-story collections and essays; they're my jam.

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

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.

I was at Sussex University studying English lit and philosophy, I had two essays due in and three seminars that day, and at the same time I was messaging my manager because I'd just started to put together the pieces of like, 'Wow. I really don't want to be doing any essays anymore. Why don't I just give this music thing a go?'

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

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.

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