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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
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions."(Essay to Leo Baeck, 1953) -- Albert Einstein
Consider the Essay as a political pamphlet on the Revolution side, and the fact that it was the Whig gospel for a century, and you will see its working merit. -- Frederick Pollock
Moller, in his Essay on Architecture, taught that the building which was fitted accurately to answer its end would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not been intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather virulent and pervasive. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The essay I had to read was called, "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope. The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in "heroic couplets". If something is called an essay, it should be an essay. -- Maureen Johnson
I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing. -- Ryszard Kapuscinski
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel. -- Alain de Botton
To love is to believe, to hope, to know; Tis an essay, a taste of Heaven below! -- Edmund Waller
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. -- Mao Zedong
Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot. -- Chris Abani
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity. -- Barbara Kingsolver
In high school, I won a prize for an essay on tuberculosis. When I got through writing the essay, I was sure I had the disease. -- Constance Baker Motley
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
Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice. -- Joyce Carol Oates
When I was ten, I wrote an essay on what I would be when I grew up and said I would be a professional soccer player and a comedian in off season. -- Will Ferrell
I'm most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page... sunrise over the desert and masses of... a whole essay before you get to the dialogue. -- Anthony Hopkins
I found the structure of writing a screenplay harder than the structure of writing an essay. But it was definitely challenging to force myself to sit and write. I'm not used to having to force myself to work. -- Judy Greer
For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play. -- Sam Shepard
A lazy man works twice as hard. My mother told that to me, and now I say it to my kids. If you're writing an essay, keep it in the lines and in the margins so you don't have to do it over. -- Gary Oldman
What I'm exploring right now is the subject of my own mortality. It's an area that I'm curious about, and I'm researching it to see if there's a photographic essay in it for me. If images don't start to come, I'll go to something else. -- Leonard Nimoy
I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards. -- Galen Rowell
The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate. -- Tony Kushner
I thought I was going to write fiction but I fell backwards into non-fiction. It started when I got locked out of two apartments in one day and I told the story to some friends, one of whom worked in the 'Village Voice' and asked me to turn it into an essay. -- Sloane Crosley
I kind of got more interested in writing after I turned in my last college essay and nobody was going to tell me what kind of academic papers to write anymore. I could write whatever I wanted, and I realized that I actually liked it when I could choose what I would write. -- Dan Millman
One's politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about. -- Thomas Mallon
At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes. -- Wilbur Smith
An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. -- Cynthia Ozick
I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument. -- George Steiner
In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it. -- Cynthia Ozick
My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I'm aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy. -- Siri Hustvedt
Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent. -- Phillip Lopate
The point of the essay is to change things. -- Edward Tufte
An idea might spark an essay, but never a story. -- Amy Hempel
The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy -- Theodor Adorno
I'm interested in the possibility of fiction which straddles narrative and essay. -- Susan Sontag
There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. -- Virginia Woolf
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Life is not a multiple choice test, it's an open-book essay exam. -- Alan Blinder
Life isn't like coursework, baby. It's one damn essay crisis after another. -- Boris Johnson
The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything -- Aldous Huxley
In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English. -- Pankaj Mishra
If you tell me, it's an essay. If you show me, it's a story. -- Barbara Greene
You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice. -- Susan Sontag
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What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay. -- Rivers Cuomo
To love is to believe, to hope, to know; 'Tis an essay, a taste of Heaven below! -- Edmund Waller
Wifehood and motherhood... are a bigger handicap than the average male genius would... essay to carry to success. -- Marie Pitt
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much. -- Donna Tartt
Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve. -- Susan Sontag
Writing a long essay is probably the most complex constructive act that most human beings areever expected to perform. -- Carl Bereiter
I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened. -- Alison Hawthorne Deming
I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading. -- Frederick Busch
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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
An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea. -- Carol Bly
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You love tests?" "Well, yeah. There are questions and answers. True or false, multiple choice, essay. What's not to love? -- Nora Roberts
Why did the 14-year old Mexican girl end up pregnant? Because her teacher told her to go do an essay. -- Carlos Mencia
Do three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay. -- Ray Bradbury
To the student I would say, "Life is principally multiple choice, but at the end there's a tough essay question. -- Robert Breault
Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey. -- Sloane Crosley
The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein. -- Karl Shapiro
The essay must be artistically rendered: You must keep the reader engaged, whether with wit, conflict, mischief, and/or yes, with honesty. -- Phillip Lopate
Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels. -- Hallie Ephron
In my own little way, I feel like I'm part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay forward. -- David Shields
I want to write an essay called "Fear of Mexico," because I always feel like Mexico's this lover that never writes to me. -- Sandra Cisneros
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
I inherited Mom's verbal skills, and participated in forensics and essay contests in elementary school - and won every essay contest I ever entered. -- Joel Salatin
There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy. -- Eula Biss
I'm interested in directing movies about situations that I've lived, so they are almost a personal essay about what I've come to believe in. -- Jodie Foster
A personal essay often includes some or a lot of personal confession. That makes the reader feel less lonely in their confusion and darkness. -- Phillip Lopate
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
The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces. -- Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time -- Thucydides
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. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
It takes me forever to actually finish something like a ten-page essay. But, when I do, I usually love what they are. It's a complicated relationship. -- Chris Abani
I don't want to see any art-writing gobbledygook or overblown words in an essay about me. If a smaller, simpler word will do - use it. -- Doris McCarthy
I wasn't particularly good at school so always found essay writing hard, so I didn't do that well at English or history, even though I enjoyed it. -- Ruby Bentall
Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published. -- Lee Gutkind
When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used. -- Susan Sontag
The essay is a wonderful medium. I might mention that some writers who longed to be novelists were better as essayists: Sontag, Baldwin, Vidal, Mary McCarthy, Mailer. -- Phillip Lopate
Not so much a film as a visual essay, exquisitely directed and photographed (by Sacha Vierny)... Difficult to watch but well worthwhile for those willing to be challenged. -- Leonard Maltin
While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest. -- Jane Yolen
The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing. -- Paul Di Filippo
There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured. -- Alberto Manguel
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
The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay. -- Richard Rodriguez
Today at school I wrote an essay about Flag Day which was so beautiful, but ever so beautiful - for I even used words without really knowing what they meant. -- Clarice Lispector
Revolution is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly. -- Mao Zedong
Every essay - the subject matter of every essay - is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world. -- Alan Lightman
Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made. -- Morton Feldman
I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose. -- Alison Hawthorne Deming
The essay form has superceded the novel as the vehicle that best suggests the prevailing apocalyptic gestalt, and as the talisman that is most able to repel the onset of paralysing dread. -- Adam Parfrey
Sometimes I do work on a longer manuscript in tandem with one or two shorter pieces - whether it's a short story or an essay (though I don't write many of the latter). -- Christine Sneed
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
As women, we'd be exponentially lighter if we'd sort through some of our emotional clutterWe need to dispose of the crud that we no longer need. Excerpt from essay #3 What's in my Purse? -- Dianne Bright
Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work. -- Carl Andre
I wrote poems and an essay about that weird language. We still remember it to a certain extent, and it still comes up when we're all together. It's so fundamental to how I think. -- Paul Beatty
My taking pictures means I'm taking a series of pictures which become an essay and then get extended into a book. That's what's exciting, to take an idea and work it through to completion. -- George A Tice
They are a great essay in male friendship, which has gone now. Men's friendship has been debased. One of the lovely things about Holmes and Watson is that they do have this great platonic relationship. -- Jeremy Brett
You don't really have to believe what you write in a blog for more than the moment when you're writing it. You don't bring the same solemnity that you would bring to an actual essay. -- Nora Ephron
Don't deliver an essay with so many points. No one can absorb it. Just say one thing... Of course, you can say the point in many different ways over and over again with different illustrations. -- Winston Churchill
I share my life experiences as a poet with my students. My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries. If I read a new poem or essay or book I'm excited about, I bring it in. -- Dorianne Laux
If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside. -- Cynthia Ozick
Each time I had an internship to do or an essay to write, I would always do it in the field of cinema. Nobody in my family worked in film and nobody could understand it. -- Thomas Bidegain
Harry moved the tip of his eagle-feather quill down the page, frowning as he looked for something that would help him write his essay, "Witch Burning in the Fourteenth Century Was Completely Pointless "? discuss. -- J. K. Rowling

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