Denis Johnson Quotes

I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

When I started writing 'Luck in the Shadows,' I just wanted to create an adventure story.

Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

I taught elementary school and painted apartments for ten years. Now I write full-time and never have to change a thing I write. Every book comes to me in a flash of inspiration and takes me about two seconds to finish. The longer books, like the 'Time Warp Trio' novels, take a little longer to write - more like four seconds.

I never wrote music or arranged songs or lyrics when I was under the influence of anything but coffee. That's not gone away.

I wanted to write it long before I wrote Every Night, Josephine! I'd been thinking about it a long time.

I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes - I'm often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

The stories are there first, and they come from my experiences wandering around in the world. They will resonate into bigger things, forces sweeping the planet, themes and archetypes, but I'm not smart enough to have lucid integration of all that in my head as I'm writing.

My most successful books, the ones that I feel the strongest about, are the ones that started with a premise that for me was deeply emotional.

There may well be writers who roll up their sleeves and say, 'I'm going to write a post-9/11 novel' but I wasn't one of those.

I try not to think too much about where my voice comes from. I'm channeling characters and emotion to come up with beautiful words that tell a story.

Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don't know what that means.

I had no plan to write a western novel, and when I realized it was happening, I was pretty surprised by it. But you have to go with what feels right.

I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

When I'm writing, I'm never trying to teach anything - maybe I'm trying to illuminate.

I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.

I never get the feeling that I've decided rationally, cold-bloodedly to write a story. On the contrary, certain events or people, sometimes dreams or readings, impose themselves suddenly and demand attention.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

I think 'Dark Blue' came to me while I was doing a project in London. I read it, and the character immediately popped out at me.