Denis Johnson

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.”

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

“It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he'd reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he'd never be able to guess what it was.”

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“He didn’t like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings.”

“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.”

“We live in the post-trash, man. It'll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there's been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one.”

“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.”

“. . . things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.”

“Harold's Bow and FoodBowl bowl bowl bowlFood food food foodThe miracle of the heavenly restaurantI mouth thisgreat dark sad eveningSuddenly they come for me in a limousineHow could I have believed I was vanquishedI never lay slain Iam the victor this parade is for meNow they have led me to the doors of GodLong ago and foreverI was in this placeon the other side of eatingwhere I am full and the emptybowl is beautiful-- from Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs”

“When I reached the street I didn't know whether to go right or left. Soon I'd have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.”

“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.”

“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.”