After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
Interpretation
The quote captures a vivid image of a rainy scene and the interplay of light and color in urban landscapes.
Denis Johnson's quote evokes a sensory experience of a rainy night where the reflective neon lights create a surreal atmosphere. The use of 'busted candy' to describe the neon suggests a mix of beauty and decay, highlighting the contrast between the vibrant colors and the grim reality of a wet street, thus inviting deeper reflections on urban life and its complexities.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion about urban photography to illustrate the impact of weather on visual storytelling.
This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you--we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination.
Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations.
If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.
Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?
The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we'd have an accident in the rain. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way.
I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.
I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.
Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.
To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionized their forms.
Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
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