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

More quotes by 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.
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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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Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.
Denis Johnson
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This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
Denis Johnson
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In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.
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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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 movie's not over till everybody's dead.
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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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And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
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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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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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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Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.
Denis Johnson
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Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
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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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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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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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
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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