John D'Agata Quotes

Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

My work was entirely nonfiction.

One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.

Literature has always been a part of my life. I studied history and literature in college. My mother is a novelist; I grew up around books.

I'm sort of nerdy, I liked Shakespeare and Chekhov and the classics.

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

I made use of the college library by borrowing books other than scientific books, such as all of the plays by George Bernard Shaw, the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. The college library helped me to develop a broader aspect on life.

"Literature" is written material that, 100 years after the death of the author, is forced upon high school students.

For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.

I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did.

A lot of people think the best work I've done was nonfiction - the 'Brothers and Keepers' book. But I think of myself as a fiction writer. And I think, if my work is put in perspective, all the books would be a continual questioning of what's true and what's not true, what's documented and what's not documented.

Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.

I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.

My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act.

I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.

It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.

I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.

I love playing with language and the rhythm of language - for some reason, this seems so much easier for me to do when I get to make things up than when writing nonfiction.

Songwriting is just like any other kind of writing - it's either fiction or nonfiction. You can even get into philosophy and politics, which I've done on occasion.

I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.