John D'Agata Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library.

As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I thought I wanted.

In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.

You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.

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

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.

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

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

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.