Quotations: Thoughts on Denis Johnson by Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Jonathan Frazen, Philip Roth, Elizabeth McCracken, Karen Russell, Anthony Doerr, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich

QUOTATIONS THOUGHTS ON DENIS JOHNSON

Denis Johnson. Drawing by Sam Messer.

“The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnson’s.”—Jonathan Franzen

“He worked at a level different from the rest of us—a true master.”—Zadie Smith

“Our most poetic American short-story writer since Hemingway.”—George Saunders

“Nobody wrote with more brutality and mercy, more hilarity and grace. What a genius he was.”—Elizabeth McCracken

“Johnson brought news from the darkest, wildest depths of American life as Mark Twain did in chapters of Huckleberry Finn and Faulkner in a slew of novels... There was no one like him.”—Philip Roth

“When Denis Johnson is justly praised for his voice, I always think, just the one? He had an eerie symphony at his command.”—Karen Russell

“His prose tiptoes a tightrope between peace and calamity.”—Anthony Doerr

“Denis Johnson was and is and will continue to be one of our strongest writers. His work has an indigenous beat that marks it as unmistakably American.”—Don DeLillo

“Everyone who reads Denis Johnson comes away thinking he has spoken directly to some wracked and ragged, yet transcendent, aspect of their own secret heart.”—Louise Erdrich