Inspirational Quotes, Motivational Sayings, and Wise Words for Daily Inspiration

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I would ask the people who were generous toward my own work. After class one day a poetry professor said to me, "Hey, there's this guy Basho you would find interesting," and so I found Basho. A fiction teacher told me, "You ought to read Clarice Lispector if you're interested in that sort of in-between stuff," and then Lispector appeared. It's not magic. You just keep your eyes open.

John D'Agata's Popular Quotes

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

- John D'Agata

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

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

- 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

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

- John D'Agata

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

- 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

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