John D'Agata Quotes

I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

Most books aren't pure nonfiction or fiction.

If you go all the way back, I've always written science-fiction, I've always written fantasy, I've always written horror stories and monster stories, right from the beginning of my career. I've always moved back and forth between the genres. I don't really recognise that there's a significant difference between them in some senses.

I write across genres so I see them, more often, as complementary instead of separated by boundaries.

I have this long-running idea that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not just, 'Did it happen or didn't it happen?' It's one of form.

To me, a good storyteller should be able to tell stories across genres.

Honestly, when you start talking about genres, you're talking as much about the business side of writing as anything else. Certainly there are elements of reader expectation that play into various genres, and those are important, but it also becomes about packaging, placement, audience....In the end, I'm not a fan of labels. I think the best fiction blurs the boundaries between genres, stretches and breaks them.

In the concordance of Nicola Six's kisses there were many subheads and subsections, many genres and phyla - chapter and verse, cross-references, multiple citations.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book.

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction.

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.

There's no literary merit in my books.

I'm trying to move a little more toward literary fiction while still retaining a popular feel.

I am really excited by the form of short fiction.

A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.

The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.

I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.