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
Feed
Till
Side
Sides
Grows
Everybody
Mean

More quotes by Denis Johnson

Image
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
Image
We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.
Denis Johnson
Image
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
Image
And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
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 have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself. Because boldness doesn't feel bold. It feels scared not brave.
Denis Johnson
Image
I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
Denis Johnson
Image
After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
Denis Johnson
Image
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
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
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
Image
I knew every raindrop by its name.
Denis Johnson
Image
Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved of how she'd loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that love like theirs couldn't possibly suffer any change.
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
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
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
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
The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.
Denis Johnson
Image
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
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