Denis Johnson Quotes

Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don't buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down.

Eventually I did that, but it took a lot of twists and turns, and there were a year or two there where I was living with no money at all - no home, no car, no nothing. I was living in somebody's garage in Los Angeles at that point - for a year.

I was happy, I wasn't beaten, and I lacked nothing. But it wasn't what people expect - it was very much sort of pinching and scraping. I don't know how my mother did it.

Out of economic hardship can come change - we are suddenly cast onto our wits and our talents and our resources and our strengths, as we lose all the choices we once had.

We didn't really feel poor. You don't know that as a kid, but we really didn't have any cash. When machinery broke down, we didn't have money for parts, so we did our best to fix it.

I was from a tough neighborhood, and we didn't have a lot of money, but my dad worked hard, and my mom is good at budgeting things. That made me appreciate things.

I traveled with my mother, Lela, and there was never enough money. I always had to roll down my silk stockings and carry a doll when we bought train tickets so I could go half-fare. If we had $3, we always figured how to tip for the trunks and still eat.

A lot of times when people become successful, people don't really understand what they had to do or the sacrifices they made to do that, or they assume that they had money. This is coming from, like, a kid who was broke and lived with roaches and a single mom in Dorchester.

I met my wife, I had no money, I had nothing, and I started my family without really, my career was nowhere, but I had these other businesses, I had these things I was doing to be able to afford a small home.

Nothing prompts creativity like poverty, a feeling of hopelessness, and a bit of panic.

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

When my trust fund ran out, I panicked. I have a lot of admiration for the kids who come to the big city with nothing and make it.

There's nothing more stressful than your stomach growling. But interestingly enough, some of my best writing came when I was poor and hungry - living off water and oatmeal, mind clear.

People who are living in economic struggle are more than their circumstances. They're majestic and creative and beautiful.

I've always been the person to look at any turmoil as temporary. I recall times where my mom was working five and six jobs, and there's still no food in the house.

Long before I achieved financial success and became the subject of a Hollywood film, I was a veteran, a single father, and a working person who was homeless.

When I was younger, my mom and I lived in a car because we didn't have anywhere to go.

I started out in a two-room apartment in Brooklyn and thought, 'Never again.'

My manager and I were broke for about three years together. That was the worst time of our lives and the best time of our lives. You have nothing, and it also is this great blank canvas of how to be inspired and how to dream up your whole life out of nothing.

Run The Jewels, me and Mike, and our connection and everything, came out of a period of time where I had personally lost everything.

I have seen extreme lows because of factors that were not in my hands - be it not having money to buy my first bike, dropping out of a prestigious engineering college without having a single rupee in my bank account, living with seven boys in a single-room kitchen in Mumbai, or eating nothing but khichdi every day. But I cherish all those moments.

Of all the advantages which come to any young man ... poverty is the greatest.

When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again.

Poverty is the step-mother of genius.

I have often noticed that the need for cash and the production of a masterpiece just don't coincide with me. Money will hit me at a big off-period and genius will hit me in starvation, that is, I often get the money when I don't think I deserve it and have been lolling around for days and days thinking the most abysmal thoughts.