Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices. — Amos Oz
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis. — Manfred Eigen
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe. — David Hare
All writing is an act of self-exploration. Even a grocery list says something about you; how much more does a novel say? — Steven Saylor
Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you - / Then, it will be true. — Langston Hughes
Write about what you know and care deeply about. When one puts one's self on paper - that is what is called good writing. — Joel Chandler Harris
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. — E. L. Doctorow
Everyday begins like a blank chalkboard, on which each one of us can write the poem of our present and our dreams for the future. — Ricky Martin
Every man is a diary in which he writes one story while intending to write another. His humblest moment is when he compares the two — Hugh B. Brown
writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind. — Alice Childress
Every artist writes his own autobiography. — Havelock Ellis
I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip. — John Kennedy Toole
Take these words home and think it through;
Or the next rhyme I write might be about you. — Prodigy
A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters — Julio Cortazar
Short Essay Quotes
Fair is foul, and foul is fair, hover through fog and filthy air. — William Shakespeare
All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand! Oh, oh, oh! — William Shakespeare
Look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under it. — William Shakespeare
A little water clears us of this deed. — William Shakespeare
Life is not a multiple choice test, it's an open-book essay exam. — Alan Blinder
My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white. — William Shakespeare
Yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness. — William Shakespeare
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself And falls on the other side — William Shakespeare
By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. — William Shakespeare
Essay Image Quotes
Writing Essays Quotes
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
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
I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938. — Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
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 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
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
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
Lucy: Our teacher wants us to write an essay on praying. Charlie Brown: Praying is important when you wake up at two o'clock in the morning feeling sick from eating something dumb the day before. Lucy: I'll just say we were out of town and I didn't have time to write anything. — Charles M. Schulz
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 just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much. — Donna Tartt
Personal Essays Quotes
Life wanted faces that would express what we wanted to tell. Not just the unusual or striking face, but the face that would speak out the message from the printed page. I am always looking for some typical person or face that will tie the picture essay together in a human way. — Margaret Bourke-White
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
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel. — Alain de Botton
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 reason for writing that essay was less a personal agenda than an attempt to explain my unease with the general label of "immigrant literature" after I had read quite a number of reviews (in different countries) involving books written by 'immigrants.' — Sasa Stanisic
Grading creative writing is always an ethical dilemma. But what you brought up about grading personal stories versus the research paper is of course a truly volatile issue in teaching memoir or the personal essay, because there's no pretense that the narrator is a character. — Debra Monroe
I believe the personal essay is underrated for both writer and reader. It affords the writer great freedom: to speak personally yet invoke others' ideas, to be rational and/or emotional, to be confident or admit doubt. — Marty Nemko
You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel. — Phillip Lopate
While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing. — Natalie Goldberg
I'm an actor and a writer and a showrunner and I edit my show. ... I have a job that three people usually have, and I have it in one person. And the idea that the critic thought that I had this excess of time for which I could go to, like, panels or write essays was just so laughable to me. — Mindy Kaling
Stanford's law school application wasn't the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. — James David Vance
Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut
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 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
A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf... For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties. — Thomas B. Macaulay
Doctrines, scriptures, sutras, essays, are not to be regarded as systems to be followed. They merely contribute to understanding. They should be for us a source of stimulation, and nothing more... Adopted, rather than used as a stimulus, they are a hindrance. — Wei Wu Wei
There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board. — A. S. Byatt
What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal. — Chinua Achebe
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 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
We should scarcely be excused in concluding this essay without calling the reader's attention to the beneficent and wise laws established by the author of nature to provide for the various exigencies of the sublunary creation, and to make the several parts dependent upon each other, so as to form one well-regulated system or whole. — John Dalton
In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials. — Stanley Kubrick
Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first City.....Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future. — Anatole France
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
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
Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. He meant physics, of course. There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology. — Israel Gelfand
We need to be ambivalent - in the essay, and in life too. Ambivalence - having mixed feelings, entertaining contradiction, living with fluctuation - is a widened embrace. It's about the coexistence of things, and in that light, we have no choice in the matter. — Charles D'Ambrosio
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
If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me. — William Shakespeare
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
Most good essays are conversations with yourself - not just your decided thoughts but your dilemmas. — Phillip Lopate
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
The point of the essay is to change things. — Edward Tufte
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
The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything — Aldous Huxley
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
In Conclusion
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