Welcome to our collection of Essays Quotes, where wisdom, insight, and inspiration collide to illuminate the art of crafting compelling narratives and thought-provoking arguments. Essays, as a literary form, have long served as vessels for profound observations, critical analyses, and personal reflections on the human experience. From the eloquent prose of classic essayists to the modern musings of contemporary thinkers, the power of the written word to capture the complexities of life and society is unparalleled.
Within these pages, you’ll find a treasure trove of quotes that encapsulate the essence of the essayistic tradition. Whether you’re seeking motivation to embark on your own writing journey, searching for guidance in articulating your thoughts, or simply delighting in the beauty of language, these quotes offer a glimpse into the minds of masters of the craft. Explore the interplay of ideas, the elegance of expression, and the depths of intellect that define the world of essays, and let these words inspire your own literary endeavors. Discover the wisdom of the ages and the insights of contemporary voices as we delve into the timeless art of essay writing. Stay tuned for an array of quotes on this topic below, waiting to ignite your creativity and ignite your passion for the written word.
Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays. Nicholson Baker
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
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. John Ralston Saul
People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the ‘Oxford bubble’ because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays. Samantha Shannon
When it comes to the personal essays I write, I just convince myself that no one will ever read them. Dani Shapiro
I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in ‘The Summer without Men.’ I also write essays about visual art. Siri Hustvedt
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 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
For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent. Diablo Cody
My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich. James Wolcott
I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff. Abigail Breslin
I’m interested in so many different things and I’d like to cover a lot of territory. I’m trying to see my show as the Sunday ‘Times.’ You have the Arts & Leisure section, you have the Op-Ed page, you have the Book Review… even the Style section has those wonderful essays about relationships. Joy Behar
My passion is capturing what it feels like to love, be it romantic or otherwise. I love to watch two people realize what they meant for each other – and that goes across all media, books, TV, movies, personal essays; everything. Taylor Jenkins Reid
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
At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I’m certain. Poems were shorter than essays. Paul Muldoon
When I ventured into writing at the age of 17, I wanted to be a good and successful writer. I just wanted to write good stuff – poems, prose, stories, essays, everything. Ruskin Bond
Theological writing is usually done in essays or books, but I hope to show that if we concentrate on sentences, we may well learn something we might otherwise miss. Stanley Hauerwas
For years following the death of my mother, I wanted to write about her. I started writing what I thought of as personal essays about growing up as her child, but I never could finish any of them. I think I was too close to that loss, and too eager to try and resolve things, to make her death make sense. Tracy K. Smith
Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I’m attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity. Marilynne Robinson
I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn’t have a handle on it. I didn’t go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff. Eileen Myles
Essays just aren’t my thing: no matter how hard I tried, it seemed I was always a bit average. Danny Wallace
Something outrageous, in the truest sense of the word, is always happening. On social networks, we’re always voicing our reactions to these outrageous events. We read essays and ‘think pieces’ about these outrageous events. We comment on the commentary. We do this because we can. Roxane Gay
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’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
Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them – and us. Nicholas Kristof
I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn’t have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape. Chelsea Cain
I don’t think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it’s enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities. Joanna Scott
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. Sudha Murty
Literary generations come and go, and each generation passeth away and is heard of no more. In the end, simply the making itself – of poems and stories and essays – delivers the only reward a writer can be sure of. And, perhaps, the only one that matters. Michael Dirda
I think I got into travelling because it was so not in my blood, so against my tendency to just stay put because my dad just hated going on holidays, because, as I’ve said in many essays, the thing that he hated more than anything else in life was spending money. And as soon as you leave your home, you’re spending money. Geoff Dyer
I have written stories, essays, even whole books on trains, scribble-scribble. Paul Theroux
Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays. Karl Kraus
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
I had been working on this series called ‘Everything Dies,’ and it was basically me doing non-fiction essays, responding to religion and stuff like that, and I really got into this ideas of telling factual stories via comics. Box Brown
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. Meghan Daum
Book reviewing dates only to the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, there were so many books being printed that magazines – they were new, too – started printing essays about them. Jill Lepore
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 truly believe that writing is a continuum – so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better. I don’t write essays as often as I should. Chris Abani
I chose to be a maths teacher because I thought the marking would be easy. You’d just tick and cross, whereas if you’re an English teacher, you’ve got to read essays. Then they said I had to analyse the methodology. It takes an eternity, it’s insane! Romesh Ranganathan
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. Maya Hawke
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
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 don’t like writing essays or theory. Adrian Mitchell
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
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
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 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 started work on my first French history book in 1969; on ‘Socialism in Provence’ in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the ‘TLS’, did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that I published my first piece in the ‘New York Review.’ Tony Judt
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
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
Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I’m not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader. Dani Shapiro
Ralph Ellison’s essays were models for me when I began my life as a critic. Slipping cultural yokes and violating aesthetic boundaries, he made criticism high-stakes work, especially for a black critic. Margo Jefferson
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
I don’t write political plays in the sense that I’m writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say ‘Well, here’s the point.’ Tony Kushner
Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I’ll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story. David Herbert Donald
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
Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions. Margaret Fuller
The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It’s not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it’s to challenge people, and it’s to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things. Meghan Daum
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. Donald Hall
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
I have more than 100 legal pads filled with handwriting. Eight novels, two books for children, countless stories and essays. Susan Straight
One of the best essays I’ve seen in recent years was by a young woman who wrote about how being chosen to choreograph a high school musical forced her to assume a leadership role she wasn’t sure she was ready for – but of course she was. Kate Klise
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
Stanford’s law school application wasn’t the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren’t a loser. J. D. Vance
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
I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart. Taiye Selasi
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. David Rakoff
I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture – I’d write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be. Reid Hoffman
Amartya Sen is best known to the general reader for his powerful essays on famine. He is an optimist about some of our gravest economic problems, such as mass starvation in a world that at present can easily produce more food than everyone can eat. Reason and voluntary participation are his watchwords. Ian Hacking
I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven. Iain Banks
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
I wouldn’t be making films if I just wanted to express some specific ideas; then I would be writing essays or something. Yorgos Lanthimos
I love essays, but they’re not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience. Chris Abani
I write many essays on whales. I love whales, especially orcas. And dolphins. Millie Bobby Brown
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger. Barbara Kingsolver
When I was a kid, they made us write these essays about what Heaven would be like. I went to this Christian school in Texas, and the thing that I wrote was no bees. No bees. No mud. No infirmities. William Jackson Harper
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
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
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
I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them. Siri Hustvedt
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. Kate Christensen
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
Many years, I would publish four books – an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays. Donald Hall
I think people seem to want to read pieces that are shorter but not as short as the pieces they can read in small bites on the Internet. It may be that the sort of long essays are hitting a sweet spot between the tiny morsels online and the full-length book. Meghan Daum
I’m not an impersonator. I’ve only got one voice and only do one guy and his first-person essays. Tom Bodett
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
I wanted to make a late-night-type show that happened to be in the morning for moms. Bravo was more interested in a blend of my books ‘Momzillas’ and ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut,’ which is a collection of nonfiction essays. Jill Kargman
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
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
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
I didn’t even walk for graduation – I did graduate, though. I got this homeschool deal. I didn’t have to go to school because I was depressed, and my mom wrote all these essays for me. I didn’t write one of them. She literally got me my diploma. Lil Peep
I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake. Leslie Fiedler
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?’ Mura Masa
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
I love Richard Thaler’s ‘Quasi Rational Economics.’ A collection of some of his most interesting and inventive essays, the real foundation of behavioral economics. Cass Sunstein
I grew up in Nagpur, and I first started enjoying the author Harishankar Parsai. He wrote mostly satire, essays on the current situation and social issues. He wrote many books and I think he was my first influence. Rajkumar Hirani
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
When I was younger, when I was at school, I did read a lot of fiction. I think as you get older perhaps you’re interested in essays and biographies and things like that. I think it’s just important to just read as much as you can. Ronald Frame
For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I’m a writer… I write poetry and essays and criticism and I’d love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts. Jess Walter
To me, cinema is cinema. Cinema is one big tree with many branches. The same as literature. In literature, you don’t just say, ‘Oh, I bought some literature.’ No, you say, ‘I bought a novel’ by so-and-so, or a book of essays by so-and-so. Jonas Mekas
