Denis Johnson Quotes

I knew every raindrop by its name.

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.

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.

Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.

I didnt finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldnt work and I didnt have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.

I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me...I'm the one happening.

After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.

We’d torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that

I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

This life is but the childhood of our immortality.

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.

Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.

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?

We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.

We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.

There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place

Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.

There's so much goop inside of us, man," he said, "and it all just wants to get out.

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.

And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.

Death is the mother of beauty.

You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations.

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

The movie's not over till everybody's dead.

They needed to share one secret after another with a beautiful woman, to peel away layer after layer, mask after mask, and still find themselves worshiped.

Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.

With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.

She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

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.

In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.

I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision.

It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.

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.

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?

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 ..."

The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.

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.

He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.

[G]ive him this much: death didn't just walk up and inhale him. He wasn't exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life.

The Americans won't win. They're not fighting for their homeland. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to fight awhile and then leave.

When I reached the street I didn't know whether to go right or left. Soon I'd have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.

. . . things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.

He didn’t like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings.

The jolt of fear had burned all the red out of my blood.