John D'Agata Quotes

Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them.

All novels are experimental.

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.

Sometimes, I'll hear from other writers or folks in the publishing industry that my books are rule-breakers, which I take as a compliment.

I don't write genre stuff in any form. I'm not interested in it. I always try to do the opposite of that.

I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.

I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in 'Bearded Ladies' are a little bit experimental.

I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.

A writer must experiment with genres. Otherwise, it is a restriction on the craft.

One of the reasons I'm not so keen on people calling me an "experimental" writer is that it suggests the work is about the experiment, when it's always the opposite - any "experimentation" is dictated by the material.

The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!

I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.

I began writing as an experimental writer.

Write for pleasure and publish for money.

Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.

I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

For poets (bear the word) Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.

The goal is to be both disciplined and loose, so that the writing does not turn into a task or a chore. To leave myself behind, along with the mechanics, and disappear into the lives of my characters.

It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.