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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.

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
Didn
Son
Writing
Influence
Think
Alive
Thinking
Maybe
Like
Anyone
Legend
Jesus
Legends
Write
Silly
Keep
Wrote

More quotes by Denis Johnson

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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 abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.
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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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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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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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And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
Denis Johnson
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We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.
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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We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.
Denis Johnson
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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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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
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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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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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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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Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.
Denis Johnson
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Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.
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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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