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"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."
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"I am often guilty of expecting the worst so as to avoid disappointment and welcome surprise."
"Expectations create and shape reality."
"Weren't you alwaysdistracted by expectation, as if every eventannounced a beloved? (Where can you find a placeto keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside yougoing and coming and often staying all night.)"
"Expect nothing but be ready for everything."
"That's the thing about being the product of happily marries parents, You grow up thinking the fairy tale is real, and more than that, you think you're entitled to live it. So far, though, it wasn't working out as planned."
"Not the action, but the expectation creates results."
"Live without expectations. Don't set parameters on your life by telling yourself that something can only be enjoyed if it is a certain way. Allow life to surprise you. Keep an open mind and enjoy all of life's treasures."
"Whatever you search for will either meet you halfway or wait for you."
"We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to."
"Expectations hurt, be it sorry, be it thank you."
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."
"All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first."
"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."
"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 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'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."
"When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar."
"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."
"I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off."
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