Books Quote by Virginia Woolf

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

— Aldous Huxley

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion,…

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Phillip Lopate

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

— Carol Bly

It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost…

— David Wroblewski

You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice.

— Susan Sontag

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music,…

— Paul Auster

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law

— Wilfred Owen

There's this idea that if you want to write, you shouldn't study literature because then you're dissecting what you love, and you should keep…

— Elif Batuman

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

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy

— Theodor Adorno

A writer must face up to the test of reality, including political reality, and that can't be done if he keeps his distance. A…

— Gunter Grass