Essays Quotes - Page 13

• An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. It tracks the evolution of a single consciousness in order to give us an experience - an experience of looking for something and then finding ourselves in a different place by the time we've finished our journey.

  John D'Agata

  Journey, Order, Track

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.

  John D'Agata

  Track, Mind, Evolution

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The essay community should have hundreds of anthologies from hundreds of different perspectives that are constantly introducing us to new writers, new work, and new visions for our genre. The whole spirit of these anthologies is that there should never be a last word in how essays are interpreted or what they can be.

  John D'Agata

  Should Have, Perspective, Community

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.

  John D'Agata

  Art, Thinking, Mind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Of course it's possible for political essays to be artful. I just want to call into question the dominance of content over form in the history of the essay. I want us to recognize that there's art involved in making this stuff, because we still don't approach the constructed nature of the essay with the same appreciation that we do poetry or fiction.

  John D'Agata

  Appreciation, Art, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The relevant features of scientific practice often have mundane explanations which don't point to any deep metaphysical moral. (Thus it would simply be messy and pointless for the chemists to essay physical reductions, or for the biologists to offer number-free explanations. It's a weird kind of science-worship that views these practical considerations as clues to the nature of reality.)

  David Papineau

  Reality, Numbers, Views

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the morning I'd write these essays, anything that I'd feel like writing, and in the afternoon, I'd spend time with my guitar. I had decided after listening to my last four or five albums that my biggest weakness musically was melody. the reason I had been singing in a monotone over the chord patterns in my songs was that I never practiced doing melodies.

  Iggy Pop

  Song, Morning, Writing

  "New Again: Iggy Pop". Interview With Lisa Robinson, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 23, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I got to college, I planned to be a math major, and, in addition to signing up for some math courses, I decided to take some philosophy. Quite by chance, I took a philosophy of science course in which the entire semester was devoted to reading Locke's Essay. I was hooked. For the next few semesters, I took nothing but philosophy and math courses, and it wasn't long before I realised that it was the philosophy that really moved me.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Reading, Math

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

  Alexander Chee

  Writing, Careers, Normal

  "Go Forth (Vol. 41)". Interview with Kristen Evans, logger.believermag.com. February 26, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You love tests?" "Well, yeah. There are questions and answers. True or false, multiple choice, essay. What's not to love?

  Nora Roberts

  Multiple Choice, Choices, True Or False

  Nora Roberts (2008). “Tribute”, p.235, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The key to good worldbuilding is leaving out most of what you create. You, as the author, had damn well better know the where all that dragon food comes from, but that doesn't mean that I, as a reader, want to read a five thousand word essay about you explaining it to me. I don't need to see the math, but I can tell by the details you provide whether or not you've thought these things through to their logical conclusions.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Mean, Math, Keys

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.

  Steve Martin

  Writing, Play, Long

  "Steve Martin: The Powells.com Interview". Interview with Jill Owens, www.powells.com. November 29, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are a lot of college writing textbooks that will include essays and short stories, and after reading the story or essay, there will be questions such as "Have YOU Had any experience with a pedophile in YOUR family?" or "When was the last time you saw YOUR mother drunk?" and they're just really good at prompting stories. You answer the question, and sometimes that can spring into a story.

  David Sedaris

  Mother, Spring, Reading

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. October 8, 2014.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'd worked on a series of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul books called The Real Deal for HCI books, which featured essays and poems from teens.Finding the right authors for the series has been no easy feat, mostly because I'm looking for a perfect blend of a teen girl with an interesting story or hook, fantastic writing talent, and the confidence to commit to writing a 30,000+ word book in a matter of months. It's a huge commitment and I recognize that, so the fit has to be there from all these different angles.

  Deborah Reber

  Girl, Teenage, Real

  4 Copy quote

• I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Focus, Musical, Important

  4 Copy quote

• I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Always Trying, Poetic, Property

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the short stories - if I can make a very lumpy contrast - in the short stories I feel like the lives of the people have a kind of prior desperation and a prior need and my longing is for the story and their lives to somehow come together, even if not finally or forever, to face something; and it felt like a lot of the time with the essays I was wading into situations where there was an assumption of finality of understanding, and I felt like I could wade into any understood moment and tear it apart and make it fall apart.

  Charles D'Ambrosio

  Fall, People, Forever

  Source: quarterlyconversation.com

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.

  Lee Gutkind

  Pain, Book, Hard Work

  Source: speechwriting-ghostwriting.typepad.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am coming from an older school, and I feel that you must learn to wait. There is that essay which was about the great notion of sitting on the mountain and waiting for the muses to cross the stream, and give you the symbols that would allow you to create. The word wait seems to me to be terribly important.

  Robert Dessaix

  School, Giving, Waiting

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think I've been mildly obsessed with my hair. I don't think I have a hugely adversarial relationship with it. One my essay is about my decision to keep coloring my hair once it started to go gray, but once I wrote the essay - once the book was in production - I decided to go gray.

  Elizabeth Benedict

  Book, Thinking, Hair

  Source: nytlive.nytimes.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing?

  Ernst Haas

  Choices, Want, Facts

  13 Copy quote

• I wasn't particularly good at school so always found essay writing hard, so I didn't do that well at English or history, even though I enjoyed it.

  Ruby Bentall

  Writing, School, Found

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source