Denis Johnson Quotes

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

When I`m writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I`m not writing for American Scholar.

In the plays - that`s where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it`s not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I`m not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don`t get to the truth of anything with facts.

If you write fiction, you`re by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don`t have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you`re not lonely anymore.

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.

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.

I`d met a woman and I got married, but the money ran out right away. I hadn`t had a job for seven months, and it just came over me that I was never going to work again. It hit me.

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.

I can`t understand why anybody would criticize anything that ends up being a novel. I`m working on a novel now, but I never entirely gave up on verse.

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

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.

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.

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