Denis Johnson Quotes

And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.

The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in—as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream.

They needed to share one secret after another with a beautiful woman, to peel away layer after layer, mask after mask, and still find themselves worshiped.

She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved; of how she'd loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that love like theirs couldn't possibly suffer any change.

Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations.

He got right down in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn't going to come. That's it. That's the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.

When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all -- cash, booze, and a wife -- he couldn't be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground.

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.

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.

Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.

Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.

Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.

That world! These days it's all been erased and they've rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?

All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dreamlike business he’d ever witnessed waking—the brilliant pastels of the last light overhead, some clouds high and white, catching daylight from beyond the valley, others ribbed and gray and pink, the lowest of them rubbing the peaks of Bussard and Queen mountains; and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utterly still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world.

And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.

We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.

With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.

[The doctor] peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk - that is, me - standing next to the orderly, Georgie, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face. 'What seems to be the trouble?' he asked.

There's so much goop inside of us, man," he said, "and it all just wants to get out.

I knew every raindrop by its name.

Death is the mother of beauty.

It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.

I hate two kinds of sentences you hear in workshops, the ones beginning "I really like ..." and the ones beginning "My problem with this poem is ..."

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.

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.

After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.

I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself. Because boldness doesn't feel bold. It feels scared not brave.

Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the "Ten Thousand Things"? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you eve know the difference?

There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place

She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.

I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.

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.

When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

There were many moments in the Vine like that one--where you might think today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn't be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons.

How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing. I'd been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do worse.

I'll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.

This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you--we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination.

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.

The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we'd have an accident in the rain. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way.

Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.

Sometimes I heard voices muttering in my head, and a lot of the time the world seemed to smolder around its edges. but I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me. All these weirdos, and me getting a little better right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.

I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.

All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.

I didnt finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldnt work and I didnt have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.

I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.