Essayists Quote by John D'Agata

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your…

— William Ernest Henley

When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer,…

— Stephen Vincent Benet

I enjoy writing personal essays in the way of Charles Lamb because it goes back to the school days when I was good in…

— Ruskin Bond

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general…

— E. B. White

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…

— Ruby Bentall

Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.

— Aaron Belz

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write…

— Jose Saramago

Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.

— Matt de la Pena

I'm a good essay writer, I know how to write. I was just good at it.

— Benny the Butcher

Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.

— Jill Lepore

Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have…

— William Ernest Henley

What I think is important about essayists, about the essay as opposed to a lot of personal writing is that the material has to…

— Meghan Daum