You move your life across the country and make a commitment to a place, and to a genre, and then you realize that neither the place nor the genre mig…

- John D'Agata

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

- John D'Agata

The best stuff that Cicero wrote, in the first century in Rome, were the Philippics, a series of speeches that he delivered against Marc Antony, whom…

- John D'Agata

Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about.

- John D'Agata

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.

- John D'Agata

You're often looking at writing from writers who, for the most part, are working in forms that traditionally fit into other genres. But sometimes, in…

- John D'Agata

In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre.

- John D'Agata

Of course it's possible for political essays to be artful. I just want to call into question the dominance of content over form in the history of the…

- John D'Agata

The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.

- John D'Agata