12 Quotes by John D'Agata

  • Author John D'Agata
  • Quote

    What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or – worse yet – leaving the blanks blank?

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  • Author John D'Agata
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    My grandmother’s is the world that dropped the bomb – itself a slick object – so elegantly smooth it managed to slip past American consciousness, past enemy lines.

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  • Author John D'Agata
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    Can we call the essay its own genre if it's so promiscuously versatile? Can we call any genre a 'genre' if, when we read it from different angles and under different shades of light, the differences between it and something else start becoming indistinguishable?

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  • Author John D'Agata
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    Yucca Mountain isn't pretty. And it also isn't large. From far away, the mountain's just a squat bulge in the middle of the desert, essentially just debris from a bigger, stronger mountain that erupted millions of years ago and hurled its broken pieces into piles across the earth.

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  • Author John D'Agata
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    It's almost impossible that an argument would naturally form the kind of arch that it does in 'Lifespan'. So, the conversation is constructed.

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  • Author John D'Agata
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    I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment.

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  • Author John D'Agata
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    The primary goal of the so-called nonfiction text is to relay the facts of an event - the facts about a person, the facts of history - which is not why I turned to this genre.

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  • Author John D'Agata
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    In its fifty-first year of publication, 'The Paris Review' continues to search for new ways to bring together writers and readers.

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  • Author John D'Agata
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    'The Paris Review's mandate has been the same for fifty years. First and foremost, this magazine is for writers; the editors' task is to support and celebrate them, especially at the beginning of their careers, but also as they move forward, venturing stories that are creative, risky, new.

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