Permanent Quote by Virginia Woolf

The essay must be artistically rendered: You must keep the reader engaged, whether with wit, conflict, mischief, and/or yes, with honesty.

— Phillip Lopate

The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter…

— Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.

— Marilynne Robinson

“It has the permanent quality of literature.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”

— Ernest Hemingway

An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea.

— Carol Bly

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

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

My teacher told us essays are like skirts....Long enough to cover the subject short enough to make it interesting.

— Anonymous

“A writer's goal is to weave the ordinary into fine silk and the truly extraordinary into diaphanous clarity ...”

— CJ Heck

“Breadwinning and the art of writing must be kept absolutely apart.”

— Anonymous

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

— Margaret Fuller

“My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the needs of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.”

— Thucydides