Top 100 D'agata Quotes
#1. All of the films I'm doing are young, urban, high-concept, funny films. That's the zone where I'd like to play and have fun in.
Vir Das
#2. I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.
John D'Agata
#3. For a while I just couldn't imagine that there was a place for me in nonfiction. I looked around at what we were calling nonfiction and I thought, "Maybe you do have to go to poetry in order to do this other weird thing in nonfiction."
John D'Agata
#4. In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre.
John D'Agata
#5. An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.
John D'Agata
#6. If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.
John D'Agata
#7. Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about.
John D'Agata
#8. What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or - worse yet - leaving the blanks blank?
John D'Agata
#9. Yet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and say "You don't belong here. That's not how we do things." I think that's problematic.
John D'Agata
#10. As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go.
John D'Agata
#11. I'd love to open a restaurant that changes every month. One month it would be a mom and bar spaghetti-and-meatball, Red Sox place, and the next it would be a British pub, and everyone gets in a fight.
Graham Elliot
#12. From the moment she'd first seen him in the Fontaine ballroom, she'd been lost. The passionate kiss a week later had destroyed her. Even now she could feel the heat of his expert lips against hers, and the remembrance of his taste made her mouth water.
Sylvia Day
#13. He'd said he was in love with her. And that just filled her up and emptied her out again. It made her want to shake, it made her want to weep. It made her want to hold onto him as if her life depended on it.
Nora Roberts
#14. It's not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It's their intimate relationship with it.
Antoine D'Agata
#15. When love enters, the whole spiritual constitution of a man changes, is filled with the Holy Ghost, and almost his form is altered.
D.H. Lawrence
#16. I think you'd have to literally live in a cave to not know anything about 'Twilight'. I've seen a few of the movies, but I haven't read the books.
Jake Abel
#17. We have some decisions to make. You'd just be going back and forth to his room to report when you might as well take all his objections at once and be done with it. The decisions aren't going to change.
Erin Kellison
#18. I promise you in [Jesus] name that if you pray with a sincere desire to hear your Heavenly Father's voice in the messages of this conference, you will discover that He has spoken to you to help you, to strengthen you, and to lead you home into His presence.
Robert D. Hales
#19. The song 'If I Had a Hammer' is geared toward people who don't have a hammer. Maybe before I had a hammer I thought I'd hammer in the morning and hammer in the evening. But once you get a hammer, you find you don't really hammer as much as you thought you would.
Ellen DeGeneres
#20. There was a point in the '80s when I looked out at my audience and I saw people that - were I not on the stage - they'd sooner slug me as they walked by me on the sidewalk. And I realized that I was way beyond the choir.
Michael Stipe
#22. If you were married to Marilyn Monroe, you'd cheat with some ugly girl.
George Burns
#23. My only contact with the outside world was an RCA Victrola, and Elvis would sing, and then I'd dream about expensive cars.
Jimmy Buffett
#24. If you've led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it's precisely the cancer that you'd expect to get. That's a bit of a yawn.
Christopher Hitchens
#25. I worked with someone who told me they'd never like me. But for some reason, I just felt like I needed her approval. So I started changing myself to please her. It made me stop being social and friendly. I was so unhappy.
Ariana Grande
#26. I felt a little lost as a student. At Iowa, I felt as if I had gotten into this program that was going to save me, and so I moved myself across the country for grad school and yet still didn't have a home. It was upsetting. And I know that's a common feeling.
John D'Agata
#27. I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.
John D'Agata
#28. In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.
John D'Agata
#29. What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.
John D'Agata
#30. While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.
John D'Agata
#31. Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.
John D'Agata
#32. I like Plutarch because I've read him forever, and I know that he's incredibly funky, even though his mainstream image is as Mr. Unfunky.
John D'Agata
#33. I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.
John D'Agata
#34. Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.
John D'Agata
#35. The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day.
John D'Agata
#36. You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.
John D'Agata
#37. It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library.
John D'Agata
#38. A risk is something that feels risky to the person who's taking it.
John D'Agata
#39. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.
Jess Walter
#40. Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.
John D'Agata
#41. Even if it's a definition that feels oppressive to us, that oppression can be inspiring because it helps us push up against something while we're writing. Or if it's a definition that we want to defend and uphold, we are given a sense of the boundaries within which we can work.
John D'Agata
#42. I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s.
John D'Agata
#43. The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.
John D'Agata
#44. I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still felt like a risk to me. So I chickened out.
John D'Agata
#45. And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see.
John D'Agata
#46. I'm not worried about what part of their life they needed to massage in order to achieve something that I get to experience as transcendent. Because that's the point of literature, I think: to connect.
John D'Agata
#47. Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer.
John D'Agata
#48. As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I thought I wanted.
John D'Agata
#49. 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 might be what you thought they were going to be, or that the world you thought you were going to find in school doesn't actually exist.
John D'Agata
#50. I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.
John D'Agata
#51. Sam gave Captain Suicide a droll stare. How did you die again? Oh wait, I know this. 'I can take 'em. I don't need to wait for reinforcements. I can do it myself.' How'd that work out for you again?
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#53. Can you get it? (Jaden) If I swear myself to eternal slavery to Artemis. Yes. (Acheron) I'd rather trade places with Prometheus and have my innards ripped out every day. (Jaden) So would I. (Acheron)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#54. I'd been beguiled by the new technology - a toddler crawling toward a gun.
Jon Ronson
#55. Her lungs felt thick and slow, her mind dissolved, she felt she could cling like a bat in the long swoon of the crannied, underword darkness. Cling like a bat and sway for ever swooning in the draughts of the darkness
D.H. Lawrence
#56. You have to nourish your creativity for it to flourish ...
Kat Von D.
#57. To find and enjoy profound happiness, learn from nature and emulate her stoic calmness.
Debasish Mridha
#58. About six months ago, I listened to Siamese Dream. That was the first time I'd ever really heard my own album, because I had separated from the experience of making the record. And it really moved me. It made me cry, it's so beautiful.
Billy Corgan
#59. You don't want to continue to do one thing and only one thing. You want to keep challenging yourself and if you do well at it, great, if you fall on your face, you tried. Like, she's really terrible at comedy! Who knew? But if you didn't try and put yourself out there you'd never know.
Lucy Liu
#60. I'd rather argue with you, angel, than laugh with anyone else."
Jesus. It took me a minute to be able to swallow the last bite in my mouth.
"You know ... I love you madly."
He smiled. "Yes, I know.
Sylvia Day
#61. Well, she said, "The reception of the semen is the height of ecstasy. I want it always, constantly." Isn't that extraordinary?
D.M. Thomas
#62. That's something that drives me crazy. When people say something twice that way, after you admit it the first time.
J.D. Salinger
#63. I still think we ought to just hire the town and take it with us. Then we'd have a good barkeep and someone to play the pianer.
Larry McMurtry
#64. Photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you'd never paid attention to.
Saul Leiter
#66. Some friends of mine got me a sweater for my birthday. I'd have preferred a moaner or a screamer, but the sweater was OK.
Steven Wright
#67. Hell hath no fury like a queen scorned. ...
... That would be the last time he made a crack about being a flamer to someone with a flamethrower for hands. Though he'd really lost it when Raven sang the lyric to Disco Inferno.
J.T. Bock
#68. If I had more time, I'd watch more woodworking or home-improvement shows, but, not enough hours in the day.
Nick Offerman
#69. I would suggest that the prisons I incessantly create are not designed to lock me in, rather they are designed to lock the world out. And the oddity is that either way, I am a prisoner who has sentenced himself to a prison within which I do not belong.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#70. Its not greener on the other side of the fence, its just a different shade of brown over there. Be happy with who you are and where you are in life.
D. Alyce Domain
#71. Julian gave his brother a slow, sweet smile. In that smile was all the love and wonder of the little boy who'd lost his brother and against all odds, gotten him back.
Cassandra Clare
#72. Anything that grows is, by definition, alive. Washington, D.C. was no exception. As a living organism, the Federal Government's number one job was self-preservation. Any threat to its existence had to be dealt with.
Brad Thor
#73. You cried when He took away your drop of water, not knowing He'd saved for you, the sea.
Yasmin Mogahed
#74. He curled his claw into a fist. "I'd like to shove a stake up that bastard's ass."
Adam's lip curled. "Remind me not to piss you off."
The demon raised his brow. "Trust that shit, mancy.
Jaye Wells
#75. AMELIA: To my friends, and family: You all may be batsh*t crazy, but even if I got to choose, I'd still choose to be with you. Life is fragile, and tomorrow is never a sure thing, so thanks for sharing your lives with me.....
Amelia Hutchins
#76. What's truly important
and what I find myself forgetting and having to relearn
is that right here, right now, I am free. Free to be myself and to express myself.
Kat Von D.
#77. Fatima's hair, what was left of it, had pulled free of the coil into which she'd put it before striking the match. Her face was now black and shiny, as if an artist commissioned to lacquer the eyes of a statue of
Katherine Boo
#78. A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#79. Whitley Bay was my first experience of the seaside. I'd buy my bucket and spade, and beach ball, and all the shops were teeming with toys. I used to spend hours on the shuggy boats.
Cherie Lunghi
#80. Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die.
J.D. Salinger
#81. We've always loved going to the movies. Our mom and dad are big movie fans. They'd take us on these movie orgys where we'd see sometimes three movies in a day.
Lilly Wachowski
#82. The dragon lifted his head and regarded her with those eerie eyes. "The princess came," he said in the saddest tone she'd ever heard.
Megan Frampton
#83. How'd you come up with cemetery?" Julian asked Nick.
"Call it divine inspiration."
"Yeah, I'm betting God was invoked a lot last night," JD said under his breath.
"Shhh," Kelly begged.
Abigail Roux
#84. In your sky, you are the brightest star.
Without you light, it's dark like tar.
So love yourself to enlighten others.
Debasish Mridha
#85. The revolution was a gift from God to the Romanian people. The Romanian people must now repay this gift by opening their hearts to people of all faiths, especially to those who suffered here in the past.
Robert D. Kaplan
#86. As parents, we're human beings, too, but sometimes we're not as understanding as we'd like to be.
Gregory Hines
#87. There's nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they are straightforward and not sneaking or sly. The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world grows grey.
D.H. Lawrence
#88. I wanted to go home to the safety of my bed and to my stuffed animals and to my people I'd known my whole life. I had nothing to say to anybody, and fervently prayed that no one there would have anything to say to me.
Rachel Cohn
#89. I'd love to have the opportunity to sing in a Disney movie.
Moira Kelly
#90. I'm just smart enough to know what it is I don't know and try to learn as I go along and accept that you're going to make mistakes, and there are going to be things that are not going to be perfect.
Ronald D. Moore
#91. Love swamped her. It always seemed to come in huge, unexpected waves that left her flailing helplessly.
J.D. Robb
#92. I started writing music when I was 15 in my bedroom, and I'd post them on MySpace, and from there it shifted to doing covers on YouTube and building my Twitter.
Tori Kelly
#93. Faith becomes the foundation I'm built on.
T.D. Jakes
#94. Behind me, Ingrid made a sort of muffled snorting sound. I can only assume she was choking on a breath mint. I shot her a look, hoping she hadn't heard anything, and saw she was wearing a poker face, which could only mean she'd heard everything.
Daniel O'Malley
#95. After a while, the anger I felt just sort of became part of me, like it was the only way I knew how to handle the grief. I didn't like who I'd become, but I was stuck in this horrible cycle of questions and blame.
Nicholas Sparks
#96. Fall in love with me, Gary! She thought. Please. Please sit here holding me and think there's nowhere on earth I'd rather be than here, and no girl I'd rather have in my lap than Beth Rose Chapman!
Caroline B. Cooney
#97. If I'd had fame early on, I'd have been able to abuse it in the way that a young man should.
Benedict Cumberbatch
#98. There is no such thing as a natural puncher. There is a natural aptitude for punching and that is different. Nobody is born the best. You have to practice and train to become the best.
Cus D'Amato
#99. I'd like to be remembered by two simple words: any two words, as long as they're simple.
Dan Mathews
#100. Andy [Warhol] was on the scene, but he wasn't an artist at first; he was more an illustrator. He was always surrounded by about ten people who worshipped him. He'd go to a party and they would all come along. But he was drawing shoes and that sort of thing.
Claes Oldenburg
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
