All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first. — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“Employment in the Small Bookstore" Twelve Poems, 1975 The dust is almost motionless in this narrowness, this stillness, yet how unlike a… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“From a Berkeley Notebook' ~Denis Johnson One changes so much from moment to moment that when one hugs oneself against the chill… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
I hate two kinds of sentences you hear in workshops, the ones beginning "I really like ..." and the ones beginning "My… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“You’ve never felt good. Your suffering protects you. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free.” — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“He had laid his head back until his scalp had contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“Everything is arranged," John Robertson told me. Thank God." I forgot to mention that we appear to have one small problem," he said. Okay..."… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
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… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
I’d been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I’d even known, for three days under a phony… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“All of this while I left lifted by a strange new medium, a strange element--I now tell you that I was newly buoyant in… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“He didn’t know what country he was in, but he was at home in the universe.” — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide.” — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off. — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“Who said it? – probably Confucius – “I can’t beat a sculpture from a stone with a sledgehammer; I can’t free the soul of… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
