Quotes from Denis Johnson

Death is the mother of beauty.

Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.

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.

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.

I knew every raindrop by its name.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me...I'm the one happening.

We'd torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

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.

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.