top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Work quotes
"The job description, like most, used complicated words that made job-hopefuls hesitant to apply because it may be out of their range of capability."
"We are so used to working that not working is the new hard work."
"I didn't want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank."
"Wherever you work, work hard and educate yourself continuously. You must never forget social welfare, ethics and honesty. However, there is no guarantee for your career progression. Therefore, don't expect that only the best people will be promoted."
"And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain."
"A salary is a tax employers pay, every four weeks, for putting an employee's dream on hold."
"Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don't complain."
"Work is a vehicle with which man chases some fleeting destination called a full tummy."
"To some women, a job plays the role of a man. To most women, a man plays the role of a job."
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."
"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."
"When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar."
"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."
"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."
"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."
bottom of page