A Quote by John D'Agata

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.
I have found that sharing this very intimate part of my life has been really powerful, because it has brought support from people I wasn't expecting. It's cathartic on many different levels. As I get older, I realize it's so much better to connect with people. It makes everything better to connect. Only connect. Why not have my art be about that? I think of it as moving from the third person to the first.
Life is about unforgettable and transcendent moments, isn't it? The point of music is to get the moment.
I get a little myopic in the act of doing any writing. I think I'm not as interested or not as able to write about balance, because I think there's something I want to try to get at. I'm trying to get at something about the experience of growing up or about families.
It's a contact sport. At some point, I'll get hit and that's part of it. I'm not worried about it.
At the age of 19, the day after I graduated high school, I moved to a place where it snowed, and I became a massage therapist. With this job, all I needed were my hands and my massage table by my side and I could go anywhere. For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent, and completely in control of my life.
If I get too old to write, or short-term memory loss - that was the one Philip Roth was worried about - if I got to that point, that would be terrible, because everything about my life has been streaming toward writing and having something to say. That would make me feel as though I were in an iron maiden of some kind.
I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.
I don't fear death because I don't fear anything I don't understand. When I start to think about it, I order a massage and it goes away.
This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.
I've said jokes where I thought people might get up and hit me for this. A couple of people have thought about it. But they didn't. It gives you a lot of power, because if you're on shows where people are worried about getting sacked and you're not, then you're transcendent because you say what other people would like to say.
You know, I think when I was young, I was just always worried about how I was going to fit in, what I needed to do to be better. I think now, as you get older, you kind of think more as a team concept of, 'How do I get everyone on the same page?'
In this hectic life, we have no time to take care of ourselves, hence massage is needed for rejuvenation and stress reduction. A lot of people are looking for quick fixes: like, they are taking medications, and they are doing other things which are not healthy. But massage is very holistic and natural.
A lot of people in college go astray because they choose something that doesn't really, really connect to them. And if it doesn't connect to you, you're not able to put in that 10,000 hours that people talk about. You don't have the focus. And you start off in life on the wrong foot and you never get back.
Lying became part of my life. I lied if I needed to lie to get something or get out of something
t is for me because I needed to do this. I really think actors shouldn't act unless they really need it in their lives. I think it has to be something that is so much a part of your chemistry, such a passion, that you can't live without it. You should not do it just because you are seeking fame or want to get rich.
I think massage is a very important part of life, which is present from centuries as an imminent part of India's tradition.
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