Latest John D'Agata Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

• We approach nonfiction at a much different level than we approach fiction or poetry or drama: that there's almost no room for metaphor. We expect the "I" in any nonfiction text to be an autobiographical "I" when there is a history in the essay of the "I" being a persona.

  John D'Agata

  Drama, Different, Metaphor

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.

  John D'Agata

  Believe, Want, Chairs

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still felt like a risk to me. So I chickened out.

  John D'Agata

  Silly, Risk, Sound

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When I'm teaching, I'm not really doing my job if the student who's always comfortable doing wacko stuff all over the page keeps getting gold stars from me for doing wacko stuff all over the page. A riskier assignment for that student, who might be used to hiding behind a lot of formal armor, would be to try to do something straightforward, traditionally, in which they are much more directly laid bare for the reader.

  John D'Agata

  Jobs, Stars, Teaching

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

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

  John D'Agata

  Risk, Feels, Persons

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

• 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

• 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

• The essay community should have hundreds of anthologies from hundreds of different perspectives that are constantly introducing us to new writers, new work, and new visions for our genre. The whole spirit of these anthologies is that there should never be a last word in how essays are interpreted or what they can be.

  John D'Agata

  Should Have, Perspective, Community

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Even if it's a definition that feels oppressive to us, that oppression can be inspiring because it helps us push up against something while we're writing. Or if it's a definition that we want to defend and uphold, we are given a sense of the boundaries within which we can work.

  John D'Agata

  Writing, Definitions, Want

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  John D'Agata

  Track, Mind, Evolution

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur.

  John D'Agata

  Boys, Facts, Posters

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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