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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."
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"Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique."
"I just came into my own sexuality at thirty. I don't think it's something you can deeply experience at 18 or any time before that."
"It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it."
"Through this experience we have been warned - learn everything, don't forget anything!"
"Failure is only an experience. Experience is the foundation of any success."
"War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it."
"I will perform My Heart Will Go On for the rest of my life and it will always remain a very emotional experience for me."
"We are all the sum of a million moments in our lives."
"Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are checks drawn on insufficient funds."
"Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl - as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response."
Explore more quotes by Denis Johnson
"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."
"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."
"I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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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