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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
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
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. -- Lenny Bruce
I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it. -- Diane Cilento
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
In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll's Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit. -- Charlie Chaplin
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. -- Aaron Lazar
The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make to them; a man may live long, yet get little from life. Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will - Montaigne, Essays -- Barbara Taylor Bradford
I don't like writing essays or theory. -- Adrian Mitchell
The point of the essay is to change things. -- Edward Tufte
I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing. -- Ryszard Kapuscinski
Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays. -- Karl Kraus
I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart. -- Taiye Selasi
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel. -- Alain de Botton
My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich. -- James Wolcott
To love is to believe, to hope, to know; 'Tis an essay, a taste of Heaven below! -- Edmund Waller
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much. -- Donna Tartt
I'm not an impersonator. I've only got one voice and only do one guy and his first-person essays. -- Tom Bodett
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. -- Mao Zedong
Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story. -- David Herbert Donald
I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake. -- Leslie Fiedler
Drama school is fundamentally practical. I didn't write any essays, so I came out with a BA honors degree in acting. -- Emilia Clarke
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. -- Michael Connelly
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
My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha'am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha'am's essays. -- Noam Chomsky
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
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. -- Joyce Carol Oates
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. -- Tom Wolfe
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
Oftentimes, when people don't respond to text messages or emails, I just start writing long, long in-depth essays and diatribes where characters start to appear and narrative threads begin. -- Lucas Neff
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
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
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. -- Joan Collins
Cummings' career as a writer - and a painter - was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten. -- Billy Collins
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
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. -- Justin Rosenstein
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. -- Sam Abell
For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse. -- Alice Walker
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
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
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
I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects. -- Laura Esquivel
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. -- Maya Angelou
I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer. -- Wole Soyinka
I grew up poor in crappy situations... various crappy situations. What kept me sane was reading and music. I had so many different literary tastes growing up, be it fiction like Stephen King or Piers Anthony or non-fiction like reading Hunter S. Thompson essays or reading the Beats. I was a huge fan of the Beat movement. -- Corey Taylor
For all the power of video and film, I am not giving up my pen. I am just much more likely to try to link essays to webcasts or videos. The best way for these two media to move forward, to inform and make change, is in tandem; together they are more than the sum of their parts. -- Naomi Wolf
My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once. -- Jess Walter
In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike. -- Maya Angelou
I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing. -- Maya Angelou
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger. -- Barbara Kingsolver
Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays. -- Nicholson Baker
All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge. -- Geoff Dyer
I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff. -- Abigail Breslin
You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel. -- Phillip Lopate
For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent. -- Diablo Cody
For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science. -- Dennis Ritchie
Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers... that is a small population. -- Alan Lightman
Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable -- Per Brinch Hansen
Most good essays are conversations with yourself - not just your decided thoughts but your dilemmas. -- Phillip Lopate
I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience. -- Chris Abani
I put a positive spin on a difficult childhood in my 10 essays. Available on Amazon.com. -- Helen Levin
The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out. -- Marilynne Robinson
If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'. -- Anne Fadiman
Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays -- E. B. White
There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air. -- Fran Lebowitz
I think there is a difference between comic essays and war reporting, and people can tell that. -- David Sedaris
I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting. -- Tina Brown
I don't know if I have a book in me, but I'm sure I have more essays. -- Eden Robinson
I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting -- Tina Brown
Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays. -- Jill Lepore
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Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life. -- Arnold J. Toynbee
(Francis) Bacon's best known writings are his essays. They are loved for many reasons, such as their being so short. -- Richard Armour
I am waiting impatiently for the day when beleaguered, like-minded academics can order James Wolcott's collected essays for their classes. -- Camille Paglia
I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see. -- Don DeLillo
Seneca devoted much of his time to writing essays in praise of poverty, and in lending money at usurious rates. -- Josh Billings
I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven. -- Iain Banks
While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing. -- Natalie Goldberg
Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book. -- Pattiann Rogers
I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world. -- Sloane Crosley
Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas. -- Aaron Belz
For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked. -- Meghan Daum
How do our philosophers act? Do they not inscribe their signatures to the very essays they write on the propriety of despising glory. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me. -- Zadie Smith
I love writing essays and articles, so it's hard for me to resist taking assignments that inevitably pull me away from larger projects. -- Meghan Daum
Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing? -- Ernst Haas
[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. -- Anthony Bourdain
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
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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
Ultimately, whether we are writing posts, paragraphs, essays, arguments, memoirs, monographs or even just the Great American Tweet, writing is and should be a grand adventure. -- Constance Hale
I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about. -- Susan Sontag
One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it. -- Tobias Wolff
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. -- Sebastian Coe
If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial. -- Michel de Montaigne
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. -- James Meade
I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets. -- George Eliot
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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
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
From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history. -- Umberto Eco
the wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
For many years I have devoted articles and essays to newspapers, from the inside. So criticism of the newspapers was a topic that I practiced for a long time. -- Umberto Eco
Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things. -- Ross Douthat
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. -- Kathryn Harrison
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. -- Sharon Olds
Most people's major life changes don't come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed. -- Aaron Swartz
One of my favorite writers is Michel de Montaigne. My wife gave me a beautiful 17th-century edition of Montaigne's essays translated by John Florio. That's probably my most precious possession. -- Stephen Greenblatt
I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different. -- Jane Hirshfield
If you were an actor, anybody could go on Broadway and take a George Carlin hour and do it on stage as a one man show. They're all stand alone essays. -- Jay Mohr
My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style. -- Ishmael Reed
For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. -- Laurie Halse Anderson
I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas. -- Alan Lightman
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
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. -- Sloane Crosley
Mythology is about Good VS Evil, is it not? We can pretend runes and astrology and reading tea leaves...But to whom do we pray when we are terrified? Carl Sagan's essays? -- John Steakley
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. -- Nicholson Baker
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. -- Stephen Vincent Benet
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
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. -- Franka Potente

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