Quote

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

Denis Johnson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Till
Side
Sides
Grows
Everybody
Mean
Feed

More quotes by Denis Johnson

Image
The movie's not over till everybody's dead.
Denis Johnson
Image
[The doctor] peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk - that is, me - standing next to the orderly, Georgie, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face. 'What seems to be the trouble?' he asked.
Denis Johnson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.
Denis Johnson
Image
English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
Denis Johnson
Image
Death is the mother of beauty.
Denis Johnson
Image
We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.
Denis Johnson
Image
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 ...
Denis Johnson
Image
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.
Denis Johnson
Image
All the modern verse plays, they're terrible they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.
Denis Johnson
Image
I'll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.
Denis Johnson
Image
And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
Denis Johnson
Image
I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
Denis Johnson
Image
Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.
Denis Johnson
Image
She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.
Denis Johnson
Image
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.
Denis Johnson
Image
I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.
Denis Johnson
Image
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.
Denis Johnson
Image
That world! These days it's all been erased and they've rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?
Denis Johnson