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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 ...

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

More quotes by Denis Johnson

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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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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
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The movie's not over till everybody's dead.
Denis Johnson
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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
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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
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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
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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
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We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.
Denis Johnson
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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
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English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
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.
Denis Johnson
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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.
Denis Johnson
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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
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Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.
Denis Johnson
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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.
Denis Johnson
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The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.
Denis Johnson
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Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.
Denis Johnson
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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
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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.
Denis Johnson
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[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