Quotes About Essay

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

An essay is not an op-ed that tells its reader what to think. An essay is a complicated working-out of one's own contradictions and complicities.

This is how memory works: not as a transcription but as an attempt—as an essay is an attempt . . . to locate meaning between the irretrievable then and the equally unfathomable now.

And they spoke gleefully of the legendary Monday morning when Mr White arrived late and hungover, ordered the class to write an essay on the dangers of the demon drink, put his feet on his desk, and fell fast asleep.

Webster was a dry, humourless man whose character we can deduce, I think, from the title of his Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to the Pronunciation.

After reading Tolstoy's lengthy essay "On Life" in 1889, Ernest Crosby, a thirty-three-year-old American diplomat who was working in Egypt at the time, decided that diplomacy wasn't his calling and instead dedicated the next twenty-seven years of his life to writing and lecturing about Tolstoy throughout the United States.

PETE TOWNSHEND WROTE a lengthy essay, "A Discourse on Mick Jagger's Fortieth Birthday," and sent us a picture of himself holding a lit candle with "Happy Birthday Mick" written across his chest.

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.

William Lane Craig, he wrote an essay titled "Dawkins's Delusion," which responds to Dawkins's book The God Delusion. Craig does his best to piece together Dawkins's argument against God's existence, which is really "embarrassingly weak.

If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility.

To get the most attention, the essay should be wrong. Logical essays are read and understood. But an illogical or wrong essay will prompt dozens of other writers to rise and respond, thus giving the author mounds of publicity.

Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay, you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language but in their behavior as well.

I inherited Mom's verbal skills, and participated in forensics and essay contests in elementary school - and won every essay contest I ever entered.

Can we call the essay its own genre if it's so promiscuously versatile? Can we call any genre a 'genre' if, when we read it from different angles and under different shades of light, the differences between it and something else start becoming indistinguishable?

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.

The motor of fiction is narrative. The motor of essay is thought. The default of fiction is storytelling. The default of essay is memoir. Fiction: no ideas but in things. (Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing.

What the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems

Alice Walker published her important essay ("In Search of Zora Neale Hurston") in Ms. magazine in 1975

The essay "Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability" (abbreviated here as CCC) is found in the collection of Kuhn's writings The Road since Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

but his delightful essay "The Relativity of Wrong" is an exception. It is printed in one of the many collections of Asimov's essays, The Relativity of Wrong (New York: Kensington Books, 1988). Asimov makes the simple point—one that seems to

You can provide a short-format content, and it can grow, and it can spread virally across the entire Twitter system, and it can contain within it a link to something that's much longer, that's a long essay or that's a video.

Stupid English. English isn't stupid, I say. Well, my English teacher is. He makes a face. Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me. Why not? He says lunch isn't a subject. I glance at him. It isn't. Well, Jacob says, it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.