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Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.

Denis Johnson

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Denis Johnson
Age: 67 †
Born: 1949
Born: July 1
Died: 2017
Died: May 24
Actor
Essayist
Film Actor
Musician
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
München
Denis Hale Johnson
Dionysius Johnson
Dennis Johnson
Feed
Till
Side
Sides
Grows
Everybody
Mean

More quotes by Denis Johnson

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English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
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I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself. Because boldness doesn't feel bold. It feels scared not brave.
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Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations.
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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?
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We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.
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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.
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Love and violence-not to conquer one with the other but to live with both, that's what I've learned. Each pulling me a different way. If I relax my struggles they don't tear me in two, but lift me up.
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In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.
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Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.
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I hate two kinds of sentences you hear in workshops, the ones beginning I really like ... and the ones beginning My problem with this poem is ...
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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?
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The movie's not over till everybody's dead.
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After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
Denis Johnson
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Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
Denis Johnson
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There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place
Denis Johnson
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The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in—as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream.
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All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day 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
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I knew every raindrop by its name.
Denis Johnson
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I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.
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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.
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