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"I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off."
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"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."

"There are days when writing is within my power and a story unfolds along a course I've already chosen. And then there are days when the words breathe on their own and take me by the hand, leading me along unfathomed paths. Either way, the end result is this author's fairytale."

"A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents."

"What makes a writer a prophet is his ability to speak truth..."

"The eloquence of the pen is just as sharp as the point of a sword."
Explore more quotes by Denis Johnson

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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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