John D'Agata Quotes

The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside

The most accomplished literary work would be reduced to nothing by carping criticism, if the author would listen to all critics and allow every one to erase the passage which pleases him the least.

To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.

And it's always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn't want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you're dead as an artist.

I appreciate good criticism and I think it's really important. I don't like it when it's consumer advocacy, like how you should spend your $60. Great criticism is a kind of literature. I've written some criticism, and I really enjoy it because I think it's important for people to know that theatre is vital. Criticism is really unevenly distributed in this town. Obviously the power of the Times is discouraging. It's killing new plays, demolishing one after another.

I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.

I don't think of myself as a jazz musician but a medicine man.

The apostates think that everybody is wrong but themselves.

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.

Today, I don't even think that people like [James Baldwin] are possible. He would not have that much room.

It's [music composition] the most effortless thing in the world because you don't do anything. I hate to say it like that, but it's the truth.

I don't enjoy being told what to do, I'm not that kind of actor, I'm a thinking actor.

When Punk Rock happened, it created an opening in the culture... it made it ok to think you could play music, even though you had no musical training.

I think I've always felt as a band and as a musician and a music business person, I've always felt like an outsider, period.

I think when something becomes a comfortable genre, it's against what street art stood for in the beginning - breaking out of genres and taking art out of galleries. Now street art is in the gallery, and it's all made up into a nice, packaged concept.

My feeling is that I think writers in general tend to be self-conscious and it takes a bit of a leap of faith or just not giving a sh-t to write something you know people are going to criticize.

Certainly, the international image of the United States today is a lot less positive than 10 years ago. And that really shouldn't be, because you have been the victims of this awful terrorist attack, and I think America deserves the sympathy of the world.

Whatever people may say about my books - and it always amazes me when people don't like them, but sometimes they don't - the epigraphs have always been top-drawer. I think having that at the outset protects me from a lot of potential problems.

The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.

A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive.

I have been lucky that some critics joined the mob in loving something I've done, or in appreciating it. I've been lucky. But most of the critics don't like what the people like. I think they have a very strange job, and they are meant to criticize.

If a faultless poem could be produced, I am satisfied it would tire the critics themselves; and annoy the whole reading world with the spleen.

I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.

Good rock 'n' roll is something that makes you feel alive. It's something that's human, and I think that most music today isn't. ... To me good rock 'n' roll also encompasses other things, like Hank Williams and Charlie Mingus and a lot of things that aren't strictly defined as rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll is an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock 'n' roll, or a movie can be rock 'n' roll. It's a way of living your life.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.