Essay Writing Quotes

The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Talking aloud to oneself is usually indicative of a mental malady. Self-talk is also the stock in trade of an essay writer. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you're comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured. ~ Anne Fadiman

I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

Writing is part of life, but it is not part of the ordinary busyness of life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

What I think is important about essayists - about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view - is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way. ~ Meghan Daum

the best of luck in improving their English writing skills. However, in saying that, it's not up to luck so much as dedication, hard work, and a personal interest in improving your English academic writing skills. APPLY your newly learned knowledge with practical essay writing skills, and you can write you way to a BA. ~ Stephen E. Dew

Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life's legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking. You could be raped a thousand times and still be a virgin. I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel, the comfort women and teenage porno stars. Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky could fail me, I didn't care. I'd pass just with the bibliography. I was compiling a list of every single book I'd read or that I wanted to read that was about power and sex. High school should have a whole fucking course on just this. I was helping the school make curriculum ...
I was writing my essay, writing easily now. I didn't have a reader anymore like Lee or Chris but I imagined that I was writing for them both. Maybe I was writing for anyone who could fucking stand me. ~ Tamara Faith Berger

Writing is a form of intense thinking that takes a person on a journey into previously uncharted territory of the writer's mind. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Do you know what every instructor in the world wants from you? He or she really, really wants you to do two things: Demonstrate that you have understood the course material and write intelligently about your subject. ~ Scribendi

In essay writing, I'm trying to push the form of expository writing. I'm trying to remember, trying to reckon, trying to find connections with the world, the nation and me, but I'm always trying to push the form, too, without being too obvious that I'm trying to push the form. ~ Kiese Laymon

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Essayist dabble with the ache for what was lost, bemoan the slippage of time, express the desire to recapture the passage of time, exhibit reluctant acceptance for the way things are, celebrate the beautiful and the sublime, and issue a silent prayer for the mere fact that the author survived the conflicts of today and shall eyewitness another dawn. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Deciding when and where you're going to do something will dramatically increase the likelihood you'll follow through. Let's look at the results from a specific study. Because most psychology research uses students as guinea pigs, this example relates to essay writing. Students who had an essay to complete were divided into two groups. One group was asked to state when and where they would complete their essay. Of this group, 71% completed the essay before the due date. The other group was given the due date but were not asked to state when and where they'd write their essay. Only 32% of this group finished on time. This extremely simple, two-minute intervention transformed the task from one in which most people failed to one in which most people succeeded.
To implement this change in your own life whenever you're planning to take action, identify when and where you'll act. Make this a habit you do every time. ~ Alice Boyes

He gazed intently at a sheet of paper, breath suspended, a word on the quivering point of his pen poised and waiting to fall. Monoliths of books and manuscripts rose around him. All were crammed with words; words packed as solidly as bricks in a wall. Armies of them; marching on from one page to the next without pause.
He forced the pen in his tight grip a hairs'-breadth closer to the paper, so that the word stubbornly clinging to it might yield finally; flow onto the vast emptiness. Point and paper met, kissed, froze.
He sat back, breath spilling abruptly out of him, the pen laden with unformed words dangling now over the floor in his lax fingers. How, he wondered incredulously, did all those books and papers come into existence? In what faceted jewel of amber secreted in what invisible compartment of what hidden casket did others find that one word to begin the sentence, that layered itself into a paragraph, that built itself into a page, that went on to the next page, and on, and on? ~The Bards of Bone Plain ~ Patricia A. McKillip

Writing is a cerebral journey where the writer molds experience into useful thought capsules and thoughtfully takes recitative inventory of their spiritual depot. The act of personal essay writing is a subtle search to track and discover how a contiguous chain of occurrences links the essayist's case history of rational and irrational behavior. Writing a person's life story fosters acceptance of their prior personal failures and serves to open a doorway to living modestly and harmoniously. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Personal essays are often nostalgia-fused narratives written by authors with authenticity fetishes. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person's personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person's sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author's own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I thank my mother (Ma, you're only second cause you got the dedication), who used to make me write essays whenever I got into trouble, explaining exactly what I'd done and why I'd done it. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Rules are there for a reason. You are only allowed to break them if you are a master. If
you're not a master, don't confuse your ignorance with creativity or style. ~ Jordan B. Peterson

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.' ~ Neel Mukherjee

The rules seem to be these: If you have written a successful novel, everyone invites you to write short stories. If you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. But nobody wants anything until you have already proved yourself by being published somewhere else. ~ James A. Michener

There's not a conspiracy to prevent really good writing from being found You have to have the humility to fail over and over and over. ~ Ray McKinnon

Thoughts are ideas scattered in your head. When written forms a sentence. When rhymed, it forms a phrase and singing it blooms a beautiful poem. ~ Ymatruz

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not. ~ Thomas Pynchon

There is nothing I would change - to change it I would have had to write a totally different book. ~ Asne Seierstad

The dirty little secret about adventure writing is that something has to go wrong. ~ Tim Cahill

When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend's sisters,
I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

Even if I could not earn a penny from my writing, I would earn my livelihood at something else and continue to write at night. ~ Irving Wallace

Write what you would love to read. Finish what you begin to write. Your voice is uniquely yours and we are all waiting to hear it. ~ Jody Lynn Nye

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Traveling down a road of self-destruction
With no room for any reconstruction ~ Jessica-Lynn Barbour

I stayed at 'Cosmo' well beyond my internship, moving up the ranks over some 15 years to become books editor, then brand director, then editor-at-large - editing everything from an excerpt of Gore Vidal's memoir to writing some of those juicy cover lines myself. ~ John Searles

The stories are there first, and they come from my experiences wandering around in the world. They will resonate into bigger things, forces sweeping the planet, themes and archetypes, but I'm not smart enough to have lucid integration of all that in my head as I'm writing. ~ Bob Shacochis

4. Or else:
Rough draft of a letter

I think of you, often
sometimes I go back into a cafe, I ist near the door, I order a coffee
I arrange my packet of cigarettes, a box of matches, a writing pad, my felt-pen on the fake marble table
I Spend a long time stirring my cup of coffee with the teasspoon
(yet I don't put any sugar in my coffee, I drink it allowing the sugar to melt in my mouth, like the people of North, like the Russians and Poles when they drink tea)
I pretend to be precoccupied, to be reflecting, as if I had a decision to make
At the top and to the right of the sheet of paaper, I inscribe the date, sometimes the place, sometimes the time, I pretend to be writing a letter

I write slowly, very slowly, as slowly as I can, I trace, I draw each letter, each accent, I check the punctuation marks

I stare attentively at a small notice, the price-list for ice-creams, at a piece of ironwork, a blind, the hexagonal yellow ashtray (in actual fact, it's an equilaterial triangle, in the cutoff corners of which semi-circular dents have been made where cigarettes can be rested)

(...)

Outside there's a bit of sunlight
the cafe is nearly empty
two renovatior's men are having a rum at the bar, the owner is dozing behind his till, the waitress is cleaning the coffee machine

I am thinking of you
you are walking in your street, it's wintertime, you've turned up your foxf ~ Georges Perec

I write early in the morning. I just wake up whenever I feel awake and I have to be sitting and writing pretty soon after that. If I take too long to think about the impossibility of what I'm trying to, I'll be defeated by it. ~ Tim Cahill

Primatologists Richard Wrandham and Dale Peterson summarize... writing, 'Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous 5-million-year habit of lethal aggression. ~ Cacilda Jetha

Keep it in your pants." I pause, trying to keep my eyes from staying on his crotch. "Wait, are you saying you're hard right now?"
He scratches at the scruff of his chin, eyes dancing. "Pretty much, considering what I'm writing. Just say the word cock again."
"Fuck you."
"Well what do you know," he says lazily. "The word fuck works too. ~ Karina Halle

We should think about what we mean by literacy. If you say, "He's a very literate person," what you really mean is that he knows a lot, thinks a lot, has a certain frame of mind that comes through reading and knowing about various subjects.The major route open to literacy has been through reading and writing text. But we're seeing new media offer richer ways to explore knowledge and communicate, through sound and pictures. ~ Seymour Papert

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand. ~ Anne Enright

If you want your name to be remembered after your death either do something worth writing or write some thing worth reading ~ Abraham Lincoln

I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. ~ Flannery O'Connor

The water in the drains below the cobbles muttered. ~ Natasha Pulley

I like how I write better than how I speak. ~ Henry Rollins

I procrastinate in spades. In my defence, I also try to have all other distractions solved before I can concentrate on writing. My small theory is that to write for three hours, you need to feel like you have three days. To write for three days, you need to feel like you've got three weeks, and so on. ~ Markus Zusak

If we don't get reform in campaign financing, then we can write this country off. ~ Frances Farenthold

I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing 'Burial Rites,' I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry. ~ Hannah Kent

I will write," she had said, "what I enjoy writing. ~ Virginia Woolf

When I'm writing, I like to travel alone. If you really want to find out about a place, you need to be as free as possible to be spontaneous. You also need to be lonely, because loneliness is a great teacher, too. ~ Paul Theroux

I really (became) very independent. I was start(ed) to write one-woman shows and mak(e) films and to me I think I really felt like my choice (was) more important than any kind of career goal. ~ Margaret Cho

I'm afraid of coaching, of writer's classes, of writer's magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble - you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Don't apologize, justify or rationalize bad art or bad writing. If you do, you are part of it. ~ Walter Darby Bannard