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"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."
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"We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God's feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God's share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of 'our own' pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be 'our own'. A man starts a new job with a sense of vocation and, perhaps, for the first week still keeps the discharge of the vocation as his end, taking the pleasures and pains from God's hand, as they came, as 'accidents'. But in the second week he is beginning to 'know the ropes': by the third, he has quarried out of the total job his own plan for himself within that job, and when he can pursue this he feels that he is getting no more than his rights, and when he cannot, that he is being interfered."
"The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions."
"If I went to work in a factory the first thing I'd do is join a union."
"Employment stereotypes you."
"The work I did in Vertigo meant nothing if no one cared about the movie. Luckily, Vertigo had a revival and people had begun to recognize there was something special and it gained in reputation. But it just as well could have ended up rotting in film cans somewhere."
Explore more quotes by Denis Johnson
"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."
"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."
"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."
"When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar."
"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."
"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."
"All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first."
"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 really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off."
"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."
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