Denis Johnson Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?

  Denis Johnson

  Heart, Soul, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• Sometimes I heard voices muttering in my head, and a lot of the time the world seemed to smolder around its edges. but I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me. All these weirdos, and me getting a little better right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.

  Denis Johnson

  Voice, Happy Times, People

  4 Copy quote

• If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.

  Denis Johnson

  Lying, Play, Desire

  4 Copy quote

• I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision.

  Denis Johnson

  Aerospace, Voice, Double Vision

  4 Copy quote

• Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the "Ten Thousand Things"? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you eve know the difference?

  Denis Johnson

  Thinking, Opposites, Differences

  Denis Johnson (2009). “Jesus' Son: Stories”, p.57, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations.

  Denis Johnson

  Expectations, Pressure, Facts

  7 Copy quote

• They needed to share one secret after another with a beautiful woman, to peel away layer after layer, mask after mask, and still find themselves worshiped.

  Denis Johnson

  Beautiful, Secret, Layers

  Denis Johnson (1983). “Angels”, Knopf

  6 Copy quote

• I didnt finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldnt work and I didnt have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.

  Denis Johnson

  Malaria, Three, Stories

  30 Copy quote

• If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.

  Denis Johnson

  Lonely, Loneliness, Writing

  6 Copy quote

• In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.

  Denis Johnson

  Writing, Want, Humans

  4 Copy quote

• I wandered over across the hall where they were showing a short movie about vasectomies. Much later I told her that I'd actually gotten a vasectomy a long time ago, and somebody else must have gotten her pregnant. I also told her once that I had inoperable cancer and would soon be passed away and gone, eternally. But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me.

  Denis Johnson

  Cancer, Thinking, Long

  Denis Johnson (2009). “Jesus' Son: Stories”, p.54, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  7 Copy quote

• What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.

  Denis Johnson

  Jesus, Book, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it.

  Denis Johnson

  Jesus, Silly, Writing

  7 Copy quote

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