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

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This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
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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 ...
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We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.
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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.
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And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
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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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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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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.
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Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.
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After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
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I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
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Death is the mother of beauty.
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We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
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The movie's not over till everybody's dead.
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Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.
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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.
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