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Quotes About Essay

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
Honestly, the life of a serial character on television, I'd love to write an essay about it.
~ Zawe Ashton
Attempting to write an honest essay doesn't alter the multiplicity of my selves. What changes, if I take the time to stop and measure, is that my multi-selved identity acquires substance.
~ Jonathan Franzen
Essay's roots are in literature, and literature at its best invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.
~ Jonathan Franzen
Without that strong personal presence, the essay doesn't quite exist; it becomes an article, a piece, or some other indefinable verbal construction.
~ Joseph Epstein
The great essayist Montaigne understood that "in an essay, the track of a person's thoughts struggling to achieve some understanding of a problem is the plot, is the adventure." Rather than simply telling a story from her life, the memoirist both tells the story and muses upon it, trying to unravel what it means in the light of her current knowledge.
~ Judith Barrington
Moving both backward and forward in time, re-creating believable dialogue, switching back and forth between scene and summary, and controlling the pace and tension of the story, the memoirist keeps her reader engaged by being an adept storyteller. So, memoir is really a kind of hybrid form with elements of both fiction and essay, in which the author's voice, musing conversationally on a true story, is all important.
~ Judith Barrington
As you can guess, this is a test of the readers' vulnerability to stereotypes: do people rate the essay more favorably when it is attributed to a middle-aged man than they do when they believe that a young woman wrote it? They do, of course. But importantly, the difference is larger in the good-mood condition. People who are in a good mood are more likely to let their biases affect their thinking.
~ Daniel Kahneman
Theme. It's something a lot of writers don't like to think about. It brings up painful memories of high school English class ("Write a 1,000 word essay on the theme of The Great Gatsby, and be sure to relate the green light on Daisy's dock with the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. Due tomorrow.")
~ James Scott Bell
I don't remember the precise contents of my essay, but I had thoroughly savored and consumed foreign films under my brother's tutelage, and as a movie fan I found many things in Japanese cinema that did not satisfy me. I undoubtedly gave vent to all my accumulated criticisms and had a fine time doing so.
~ Akira Kurosawa
The way a story makes an argument is quite different from the way a persuasive essay does it. Emotional truth and the logic of metaphors dominate.
~ Ken Liu
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
The tagline at Westin hotels is that they strive to surprise and delight their guests. This is exactly what a college essay should do.
~ Kate Klise
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
Seneca's essay "On Anger." Anger, says Seneca, is "brief insanity," and the damage done by anger is enormous: "No plague has cost the human race more." Because of anger, he says, we see all around us people being killed, poisoned, and sued; we see cities and nations ruined.
~ William B. Irvine
He [Huxley] once explained that his aim as a novelist was 'to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay', arguing that the novel should be like a holdall, bursting with opinion and arresting ideas.
~ David Bradshaw
The public intellectual] will also describe how she can work a pop culture reference into her essay, comparing the Supreme Court to the creature in the number-one box office movie of the moment. Editors like this sort of mass-media integration, first, because it gives them a way to illustrate the piece, and second because they are under the delusion that pop-culture references will propel a piece's readership into the five-digit area.
~ David Brooks
The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude," George Orwell argued in his essay "Why I Write,
~ David L. Ulin
The most potent song on the record was the masterpiece "Sympathy for the Devil." It was a historical essay on the power of Satan.
~ Jann S. Wenner
Envy will merit, as its shade, pursue, But, like the shadow, proves the substance true.
~ Alexander Pope, Essay on Man
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
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
As we walked, I pulled out the newspaper I'd found. "Getting caught up on current events?" Sam asked. "No," Corey said. "She's doing her research for that essay we have due next week. You know Maya. Escaping a forest fire, helicopter crash, and crazed would-be kidnappers is no reason to ask for an extension." "I'm sure she brought it for fire-starter, guys.
~ Kelley Armstrong
Thomas Paine, the famous American patriot, wrote the following in an essay in 1805." He cleared his throat. "Masonry is the remains of the religion of the ancient Druids, who, like the priests of Heliopolis in Egypt and the Magi of Persia, were priests of the sun.
~ David S. Brody