I had an insanely long commute - New York to D.C. - when I worked at 'National Geographic.' I hate to waste time, so I spent my time by writing about my life on the premise that I might be able to pitch those as short essays to magazines. It wasn't until later that I realized that I was writing a book.

Charles M. Blow

In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.

Aaron Lazar

I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.

Abigail Breslin

I don't like writing essays or theory.

Adrian Mitchell

Style has become a crucial differentiating factor for most actors in the industry. I generally choose my look based on the character I essay. I research a lot on the Internet and pick something that would suit my face.

Akkineni Nagarjuna

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

Alain de Botton

Christopher Hitchens, the late essayist and sot, was a man who purposefully cultivated a lot of friends of a certain type - rich, self-important, generally dim-witted and hence easy for a well-spoken Oxbridge debater to impress - and he electrified Washington D.C. society mainly by not being a completely charmless bore.

Alex Pareene

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

Alice Walker

'Flaubert's Parrot' is an amphibious book in which what appears to be a personal essay about Flaubertian writing is gradually, delicately transformed into an extremely sad novel in which the differences between character, author, and narrator are less clear than they appear at first glance.

Alvaro Enrigue

Life is a blur when one is essaying different roles; it is so fulfilling.

Amitabh Bachchan

Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.

Amitava Kumar

An essay is not an op-ed that tells its reader what to think. An essay is a complicated working-out of one's own contradictions and complicities.

Amitava Kumar

The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you're comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured.

Anne Fadiman

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

Annie Dillard

I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.

Anthony Doerr

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

That is what I seek, to essay interesting and challenging characters, which develop me as an actor and at a personal level to work with people who inspire me to push my boundaries and work on interesting scripts which which turn into refined work of art and leave a mark on me and the audience.

Anupriya Goenka

No genre is easy. For an actor, it's a serious business even when he's essaying a funny character. In fact, comedy is more difficult.

Atul Kulkarni

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Barbara Kingsolver

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Barbara Kingsolver

I'm an actor, and it is not for me but for the writer to offer the best role to me. For me, essaying that role to the best of my ability is more important.

Barun Sobti