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."

"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."

Denis Johnson, German Writer

Experience, Truth, Lie, Desire

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"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."

Fiction

"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."

Truth

"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."

Experience

"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."

Vision

"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."

Money

"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."

Fun

"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."

Expectation

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

Writing

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

Thought

"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."

Family

"Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against."

Author Name

Personal Development

"And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs."

Author Name

Personal Development

"A misadventure is an act that has a safer, less self-detrimental, less interesting alternative. But you choose that act because you want to do something memorable and worthy of discussion."

Author Name

Personal Development

"There is more experience on the field of justification than on the camp of training. Sometimes, you got to take actions to learn more."

Author Name

Personal Development

"How long does the experience of pleasure or pain stay with you? For as long as there is weakness within. Then, further ahead they will not be there. There, one remains the 'Knower' of experience of pleasure and pain."

Author Name

Personal Development

"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."

Author Name

Personal Development

"At least I can say I once worked a day on a tea plantation in Far North Queensland."

Author Name

Personal Development

"Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine."

Author Name

Personal Development

"Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake."

Author Name

Personal Development

"Mr Lorry asks the witness questions:Ever been kicked? Might have been.Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord."

Author Name

Personal Development

5

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"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."

Fiction

"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."

Truth

"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."

Experience

"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."

Vision

"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."

Money

"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."

Fun

"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."

Expectation

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

Writing

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

Thought

"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."

Family

More

"Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against."

Author Name

Personal Development

"And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs."

Author Name

Personal Development

"A misadventure is an act that has a safer, less self-detrimental, less interesting alternative. But you choose that act because you want to do something memorable and worthy of discussion."

Author Name

Personal Development

"There is more experience on the field of justification than on the camp of training. Sometimes, you got to take actions to learn more."

Author Name

Personal Development

"How long does the experience of pleasure or pain stay with you? For as long as there is weakness within. Then, further ahead they will not be there. There, one remains the 'Knower' of experience of pleasure and pain."

Author Name

Personal Development

"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."

Author Name

Personal Development

"At least I can say I once worked a day on a tea plantation in Far North Queensland."

Author Name

Personal Development

"Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine."

Author Name

Personal Development

"Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake."

Author Name

Personal Development

"Mr Lorry asks the witness questions:Ever been kicked? Might have been.Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord."

Author Name

Personal Development