Personal Essays Quotes

• 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

  Believe, Emotional, Ideas

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• 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

  Lonely, Confusion, Darkness

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.

  Phillip Lopate

  Wheels, Essays

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Cancer, Writing, Two

  "The Writing Life". Interview with Mark Matousek, www.psychologytoday.com. July 19, 2016.

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• When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.

  Stephen Vincent Benet

  School, Graduates, Form

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

  John D'Agata

  Environment, Stranger, Wanted

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.

  John D'Agata

  Nonfiction, Students, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

  Kate Christensen

  Writing, Voice, Ease

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay.

  Robert Scholes

  Past, Play, Stories

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• I could write another collection of personal essays from what has happened to me in the last year alone. I don't seek out my material - it finds me. I am magnetic, somehow.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Writing, Years, Lasts

  Interview, www.goodreads.com. April, 2008.

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• Now the truth is, writing is a great way to deal with a lot of difficult emotional issues. It can be very therapeutic, but that's best done in your journal, or on your blog if you're an exhibitionist. Trying to put a bunch of *specific* stuff from your personal life into your story usually just isn't appropriate unless you're writing a memoir or a personal essay or something of the sort.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Writing, Emotional, Issues

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• I'd written personal essays before, but never on this scale -- never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen).

  Ayelet Waldman

  Honesty, Mean, Computer

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• I'm interested in directing movies about situations that I've lived, so they are almost a personal essay about what I've come to believe in.

  Jodie Foster

  Believe, Directing Movies, Situation

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

  Alain de Botton

  Writing, Fiction, Uncomfortable

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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