A Quote by Denis Johnson

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 ..."

Denis Johnson

Quote Topics

Beginning Hate Hear I Hate Kinds Like Poem Problem Really Sentences Two Workshops

Quote Author

Denis Johnson
German - Writer
July 1, 1949 - May 24, 2017

A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I'm locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem.

Billy Collins

Man no longer lives in the beginning--he has lost the beginning. Now he finds he is in the middle, knowing neither the end nor the beginning, and yet knowing that he is in the middle, coming from the beginning and going towards the end. He sees that his life is determined by these two facets, of which he knows only that he does not know them

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It feels like each time we are beginning at the beginning, in a really exciting way.

Jonathan Ive

Even if I remember the first time perfectly, I don't remember the beginning at all. I mean: the beginning of addiction. It's hard to say when it becomes a problem; it sneaks up on you like a sun shower.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

The beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man the beginning is just the beginning, what came before is nigh on worthless.

Jose Saramago

As a writer, you look for someplace to start. Once you have a beginning and you've written the first two sentences, nothing else will ever change it.

Ronee Blakley

At the very beginning when I begin writing a poem I try not to think of the audience or anyone at all except for trying to get at the very center of what is driving that poem. In a way it's like analyzing myself.

Rita Dove

The difference between 'lighght' and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn't have a reading process. Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn't. You can see it all at once. It's instant.

Aram Saroyan

I like playing... I don't know. I think that's what was really exciting about playing Knives, too, from the beginning was that you get to kind of do both of that. She's almost like two different people, but that's what's cool about it, because I get to show her growth and that's the thing that's really cool about Knives, you get to really see her grow up from being meek and innocent and naïve at the beginning to this powerful girl who is going for what she really believes in and what she really wants.

Ellen Wong

You need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.

Neil Gaiman

The beginning of faith is the beginning of fruitfulness; but the beginning of unbelief, however glittering, is empty.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We're beginning to enter an era where it gets really cheap and really fast to begin to do things like make fuels, and make textiles, and make extra teeth for ourselves. And we're beginning to think about how we regrow our bladders.

Juan Enriquez

In the beginning was the Word. It doesn't say in the beginning was God. In the beginning was the Word because in the very beginning of every moment of time and space your word counts. Your whole destiny is written in the Word.

Harbhajan Singh Yogi

Vietnam, really more accurately, Laos, was almost after Berlin the top problem at the beginning of the Kennedy Administration in '61, foreign problem.