A Quote by Denis Johnson

In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts.
I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.
My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in vérité. Maybe more so.
The New Yorker has devoted itself for 59 years not only to facts and literal accuracy but to truth. And truth begins, journalistically, with the facts.
Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.
A very bland eleven-year-old, playing computer games. I went to a local primary school but I wasn't anything special or anything insanely interesting. I didn't have a crazy personality. I was somewhat book smart, but I wasn't hanging off the teacher, nor was I messing up in class. I wasn't doing much to disrupt anything. I was just there, existing.
So much of what I am doing in my fiction is just trying to get into interesting places in terms of language or form, places that don't bore me. And this happens via hundreds of quick micro-decisions that are done "to taste," so to speak. So the experience is one of groping toward that interesting place - trying to leap away from anything that seems boring, or about which I don't have strong opinions. Essentially trying to avoid that moment where, devoid of any strong feeling, I start conceptualizing.
We learn to make a shell for ourselves when we are young and then spend the rest of our lives hoping for someone to reach inside and touch us. Just touch us—anything more than that would be too much for us to bear.
I am growing and learning. There's so much more that I want to accomplish and do. I'm gonna do it at whatever pace it happens. I'm not trying to rush anything or slow anything down.
If there is anything unique about my writing it is the way that I combine poetry and prose, not just on the level of having a poem here, prose there, but that it really is a true amalgam.
The sheep-people don't think for themselves anymore. You can say anything and it's the gospel truth and they don't have to go research it or anything, and they believe everything the news tells them. People don't go and do their own investigations if it's relationships or politics or anything.
The truth is you can't try to let go. Trying is the opposite of letting go. To let go is to relinquish trying. To let go is much more like to let be.
If you wake up one morning realising that you do not know anything, then you are awake. If you still think you know something, then you are still asleep. If you are still trying to know, you are still trying to control. If you are still trying to control then you still think something can 'go wrong'. If you still think something can go wrong then you are not in touch with the source. If you are not in touch with the source then you live in fear. You are living in the fear that you have created, and that you are trying to get away from.
I rarely ever do anything crazy, I really like to be careful to stay in a safe spot, I don't want to do anything, like, insane. I have a lot of people around me to make sure I don't do anything crazy.
The truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.
You can ask yourself, if a film makes a claim, is the claim true or false? Having said that, a style of presenting material doesn't guarantee truth. There's this crazy idea that somehow you pick a style, and by virtue of picking the style, you've provided something that is more truthful. It's as if you imagine that changing the font on a sentence you write makes it more truthful.
I like rap. I like anything with soul. I like anything you can feel, anything that makes you think that the artist had to make that song, or they were going to go crazy.
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