Wit & Attitude Quote by Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson is staging a quiet jailbreak from the tyranny of facts. He starts with a provocation - “take a lie” - then flips it: the lie isn’t the enemy of truth, it’s raw material, a solvent that can dissolve the crusted-over “known” and expose something truer underneath. The key move is his distinction between truth and fact. Facts are ledger entries; truth is the felt shape of a life, the moral weather inside an event. Johnson’s work, from Jesus’ Son onward, lives in that gap: addicts, drifters, casualties of American promise who may misremember details but rarely misreport their spiritual condition.

The subtext is a defense of art against a culture that confuses accuracy with honesty. A play (or a novel) asks you to consent to an obvious fiction. Johnson isn’t apologizing for that; he’s arguing that the consent itself is the instrument. You “allow your desire for the truth” - not your desire to be entertained, not your desire to be right. That desire is an ethical posture, a willingness to be moved and implicated. Only then does the lie yield “some truth”: not courtroom-proof, but recognition.

The unfinished last line - “we need to be assured that the experience we’re having” - points toward trust. Art’s job isn’t to launder reality into neat lessons; it’s to convince you the emotional stakes are real, that your attention isn’t being gamed. Johnson is describing authenticity as a contract: the audience agrees to pretend, the artist agrees not to fake what matters.