John D'Agata Quotes

Quotes about:

• Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.

  John D'Agata

  Want, Facts, Obsession

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  8 Copy quote

• The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.

  John D'Agata

  Movement, Want, Figures

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  8 Copy quote

• An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. It tracks the evolution of a single consciousness in order to give us an experience - an experience of looking for something and then finding ourselves in a different place by the time we've finished our journey.

  John D'Agata

  Journey, Order, Track

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  8 Copy quote

• Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

  John D'Agata

  Sometimes, Ends, Essays

  5 Copy quote

• A risk is something that feels risky to the person who's taking it.

  John D'Agata

  Risk, Feels, Persons

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Of course it's possible for political essays to be artful. I just want to call into question the dominance of content over form in the history of the essay. I want us to recognize that there's art involved in making this stuff, because we still don't approach the constructed nature of the essay with the same appreciation that we do poetry or fiction.

  John D'Agata

  Appreciation, Art, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about.

  John D'Agata

  Talking, Borders, Needs

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  8 Copy quote

• I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment. Also, roughly around the time we were doing this fact-checking. And I never really understood why people think what nonfiction's job is to give them information as opposed to something else.

  John D'Agata

  Thinking, People, Giving

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  7 Copy quote

• In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre.

  John D'Agata

  Definitions, Want, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.

  John D'Agata

  Art, Thinking, Mind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.

  John D'Agata

  Track, Mind, Evolution

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.

  John D'Agata

  School, Artist, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• When you're a young writer and you look at people praising a big hefty anthology that has uncovered a long lost genre, it can be disorienting to look inside it and think, "But what it's uncovered still isn't me. What does this mean? Do I not belong in this genre, or is there more of the genre yet to find?"

  John D'Agata

  Mean, Thinking, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

• The best stuff that Cicero wrote, in the first century in Rome, were the Philippics, a series of speeches that he delivered against Marc Antony, whom he thought was irreparably dismantling the Republic of Rome. Those speeches are powerful because they're not only really pointed but they're thrillingly beautiful - and that's precisely what made them dangerous: the fact that people wanted to read them.

  John D'Agata

  Beautiful, Powerful, Rome

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• You move your life across the country and make a commitment to a place, and to a genre, and then you realize that neither the place nor the genre might be what you thought they were going to be, or that the world you thought you were going to find in school doesn't actually exist.

  John D'Agata

  Country, Moving, Commitment

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

• The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day.

  John D'Agata

  Intimate, Form, Known

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.

  John D'Agata

  Philosophical, Writing, Fate

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• People like to say that Plutarch's is a really "personal" voice, but in truth Plutarch tells us very little about his life. His voice is personable but never personal. It feels intimate because he's addressing the world as we experience it, at this level, a human level, rather than way up here where very few of us live.

  John D'Agata

  Voice, People, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer.

  John D'Agata

  People, May, Helping

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm not worried about what part of their life they needed to massage in order to achieve something that I get to experience as transcendent. Because that's the point of literature, I think: to connect.

  John D'Agata

  Thinking, Order, Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

  John D'Agata

  Environment, Stranger, Wanted

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I like Plutarch because I've read him forever, and I know that he's incredibly funky, even though his mainstream image is as Mr. Unfunky.

  John D'Agata

  Forever, Mainstream, Funky

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.

  John D'Agata

  Looks, Example, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s.

  John D'Agata

  Thinking, Way, Nonfiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.

  John D'Agata

  Nonfiction, Students, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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