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Denis Johnson

"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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"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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"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."

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"Truth does not sit in a cave and hide like a lie. It wanders around proudly and roars loudly like a lion."

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"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true."

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Asa Don Brown

"When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me NOT to do. Their main pitch was that achievement equaled happiness, when all you had to do was study rock stars, or movie stars, or them, to see that they were mostly miserable. They were all running around in mazes like everyone else."

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"The only sentence that begins with 'I' that's true of me is I'm full of shit."

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"Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth."

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"Truth is hard-hearted and unrelenting, too clear, precise; a lie is much more imaginative."

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"Truth will keep on telling the truthLies will lie to be more uncouthNo more rainbow after the stormNowhere to escape leaving the norm."

Explore more quotes by Denis Johnson

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Denis Johnson
"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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Denis Johnson
"I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off."
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Denis Johnson
"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."
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Denis Johnson
"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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Denis Johnson
"When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar."
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Denis Johnson
"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."
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Denis Johnson
"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."
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Denis Johnson
"All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first."
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Denis Johnson
"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."
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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."
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