12 Quotes by John D'Agata

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

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.

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?

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.

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

I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment.

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.

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

'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.