Quote

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

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
Ones
Hear
Hate
Workshops
Two
Poem
Problem
Sentences
Kind
Kinds
Really
Beginning
Like
Teaching

More quotes by Denis Johnson

Image
Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.
Denis Johnson
Image
Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
Denis Johnson
Image
We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.
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
And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
Denis Johnson
Image
English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
Denis Johnson
Image
In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.
Denis Johnson
Image
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.
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
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
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
Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.
Denis Johnson
Image
I knew every raindrop by its name.
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
This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
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
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
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
The movie's not over till everybody's dead.
Denis Johnson
Image
There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place
Denis Johnson