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

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.
Mao Tse-Tung

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

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
Donna Tartt

I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.
Galen Rowell

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Alain de Botton

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

I'm most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page... sunrise over the desert and masses of... a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.
Anthony Hopkins

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

In high school, I won a prize for an essay on tuberculosis. When I got through writing the essay, I was sure I had the disease.
Constance Baker Motley

One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case.
James Payn

The point of the essay is to change things.
Edward Tufte

To love is to believe, to hope, to know; Tis an essay, a taste of Heaven below!
Edmund Waller

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

Why, in such a case, should the performer essay any sort of considered approach at all?
Brian Ferneyhough