Top 75 Essay Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Essay Quotes from famous people such as Suman Ranganathan, Nick Hornby, Elizabeth Flock, Tara Westover, Joyce Carol Oates, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I'm not in any rat race. This allows me to take up role

I’m not in any rat race. This allows me to take up roles that are traditionally considered risky for a heroine to essay.
Suman Ranganathan
‘An Education’ was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.
Nick Hornby
Much has been written about Trump’s style of speech, which linguists have said is often unintelligible yet deeply compelling. Orwell’s famous 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language,’ centers on the use of abstract words, often by politicians, to obscure reality.
Elizabeth Flock
I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.
Tara Westover
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
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Alain de Botton
Writing an essay is like a school assignment: I have my topic, I organize my thoughts, and I write it. I have complete control over what I’m doing. Writing a novel is like setting out on a journey without knowing who or what I’ll encounter, how long it’s going to take, or where I’m going to end up.
Tawni O’Dell
I wish to continue to essay roles that will help me find my place in the audience’s hearts.
Raashi Khanna
I have quite a handful of projects here in Tollygunje film industry. There are films like ‘Aschorjo Prodip,’ where I essay a modern day salesman, and others like Aparna Sen’s ‘Gaynar Baksho.’ Let the audience judge me for these roles.
Saswata Chatterjee
My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don’t make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I’m aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy.
Siri Hustvedt
When I was ten, I wrote an essay on what I would be when I grew up and said I would be a professional soccer player and a comedian in off season.
Will Ferrell
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that’s it. I didn’t write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Jesmyn Ward
I’ll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.
Anthony Doerr
In writing, something is always left out: it can’t be articulated in the space of an essay.
Glenn Ligon
We’d had books in my house growing up, but we had never had anything like lectures. I had never written an essay for my mother. I had never taken an exam. Because I was working a lot as a kid, I just hadn’t elected to read that much.
Tara Westover
I don’t have the looks to compete at a bar, and I’m not that funny. So the last thing I want is to be in a situation where that’s what I’m competing on. I’d rather be on OkCupid or Match, where I can write a 300-word essay about myself that’s really good.
Sam Yagan
When I can find a story that explores something that I don’t know what I think, I’ve got a play. If I knew the answer, I would write a speech or an essay.
Mike Bartlett
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.
Leonard Nimoy
I always wrote stories, but I do remember a particular moment in middle school where I became passionate about essay writing.
Rupi Kaur
An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.
Cynthia Ozick
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.
Biz Stone
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
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?
John D’Agata
When I lead essay workshops, I ask students to come up with at least five topics, which they’ll narrow down to one. The winning idea should be the story the student is most excited to tell because it honestly reflects his or her best self.
Kate Klise
I had tried writing novels for many years, and they always escaped me. For a long time, I thought, ‘It’s just not in me to write a novel. It’s not something I’m able to do.’ It seemed like everything I wrote naturally ended at the bottom of page three. A picture book, three pages; an essay, three pages.
Kathi Appelt
In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don’t know where you are going – sometimes down to the last paragraph – and that is the pleasure of it.
Cynthia Ozick
I love the essay. It’s my favorite genre to work in.
Meghan Daum
I kind of got more interested in writing after I turned in my last college essay and nobody was going to tell me what kind of academic papers to write anymore. I could write whatever I wanted, and I realized that I actually liked it when I could choose what I would write.
Dan Millman
The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I’m afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in ‘The Nation’ or not. But you want to participate.
Tony Kushner
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
One time, I was given an essay topic: to describe a perfect horse, whom the mere sight of the rider’s whip would make obedient. I depicted this perfect horse throwing his rider at the sight of the whip.
Marquis de Lafayette
'Flaubert's Parrot' is an amphibious book in which what

‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ is an amphibious book in which what appears to be a personal essay about Flaubertian writing is gradually, delicately transformed into an extremely sad novel in which the differences between character, author, and narrator are less clear than they appear at first glance.
Alvaro Enrigue
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
My to-do list is the only form of organization I have, other than my iCal. It’s not all work stuff; it’s a lot of movies that I want to watch sooner rather than later. I have a list that’s like, ‘Read an essay from this book, then this one, then go back to this one.’
Tavi Gevinson
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
I didn’t really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.
Joel Salatin
The United States has been turned into a mindless true-false test, instead of the complex essay exam, it should be. You are either for open borders, or you are racist and anti-immigration. It just doesn’t work that way.
Charlie Kirk
Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.
Amitava Kumar
In 1939, Orwell wrote a long essay titled ‘Inside the Whale,’ about modernism, the nineteen-thirties, Henry Miller, and ‘Tropic of Cancer.’
Keith Gessen
Vera Caspary wrote an essay called ‘My ‘Laura’ and Otto’s’ where she talks about the arguments she had with Preminger. She felt that not only did he misunderstand the character but that he couldn’t help but be misogynist.
Sarah Weinman
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’d always try to get a C, maybe a B. Other girls would trot off a brilliant essay and go off to Oxford; I’d think: ‘Where is the justice?’ I took A-levels in English, history and theatre studies and got three Bs.
Romola Garai
While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest.
Jane Yolen
In school, my favourite class was when we were given a subject for an essay on which we could freewheel. And poetry: I’ve always written it and loved the way words interact, in meaning and in sound.
Stephen Hough
For TV you also get those pre-interviews when researchers ask you what you’re going to say. The pre-interview drives me insane. If they’ve already decided the outcome, why don’t I just hand in an essay? Maybe if we talk we’ll find something out. I’d rather just have an awkward pause.
Jarvis Cocker