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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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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
Important
Mostly
Plays
Poetry
Terrible
Modern
Firsts
Play
Verse
First
Verses

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.
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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I knew every raindrop by its name.
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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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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I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
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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This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
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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English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
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?
Denis Johnson
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The movie's not over till everybody's dead.
Denis Johnson
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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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Death is the mother of beauty.
Denis Johnson