A Quote by John D'Agata

I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment.

John D'Agata

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Data Idea Moment Never Nonfiction Ought Really Understood

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John D'Agata
American - Writer
Born: 1975

I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment. Also, roughly around the time we were doing this fact-checking. And I never really understood why people think what nonfiction's job is to give them information as opposed to something else.

John D'Agata

When I write nonfiction, it's always absolutely true. There will be no moment in my nonfiction where I have made something up and have to apologize to the bullying hostess of a talk show.

Jamaica Kincaid

From a young age, I understood the idea of balanced flavor - the reason you put ketchup on a hamburger. I was that kid who wouldn't eat something if there was something missing. I never really understood it until I began cooking professionally, balancing acids, sweets, spicy flavors and fat.

Michael Mina

Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. Most organizations are missing this ability to connect all the data together.

Tim Berners-Lee

What will the greatest experiment discover? I have no idea!, maybe nothing!, If we won't check, we will never know. In science there is never a guarantee of success. If you understood this last sentence, then you understood the most important message of this lecture.

Nathan Seiberg

Really, the moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the original idea is, "What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?" Really, from that moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it develops.

Douglas Adams

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

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

I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.

Jesmyn Ward

You wish they understood, as you do, that there is no escape and never was, that from the moment two cells combined to become one they were doomed. You wish they understood that there is joy in this fact, greater joy and love in just this one last moment than they experienced in the entirety of their lives. Because even in this last moment there is still Everything, whole galaxies and eons, the sum total of every experience across time, shrunk to the head of a pin, theirs for the asking, right here, right now. And so anything, anything, anything is possible.

Ron Currie Jr.

I'm kind of fascinated by this idea that we can surround ourselves with information: we can just pile up data after data after data and arm ourselves with facts and yet still not be able to answer the questions that we have.

John D'Agata

I think, about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Fiction is not really about anything: it is what it is. But nonfiction - and you see this particularly with something like the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction - nonfiction we define in relation to what it's about. So, Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. It's "about" Stalingrad. Or, here's a book by Claire Tomalin: it's "about" Charles Dickens.

Geoff Dyer

We must all learn to live together as brothers. Or we will all perish together as foolsFor some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I never really considered writing something that was nonfiction.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

I just never really understood the reason I understood movies so well, and I didn't realize that me being such a people-watcher was even a gift at all.

Jason Mitchell

And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time.

Zadie Smith

A Quote by John D'Agata

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