Some years ago, I was lucky to take a class with Denis Johnson, who dressed like a card-shark, in flashy jackets and (unlike a card-shark) wept over sentences. He gave my class a 69-page list of writing quotes he returned to frequently. Posting it here: https://tinyurl.com/bc1fe2re 

One of the most charming things about him was how much he loved self-help books like "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron. He woke up every morning and free-wrote 3 pages (as per Cameron's instructions) and then flushed them down the toilet (he may have invented this part).

Now I'm remembering other stuff. Such as: his wife, when she read his work, was only allowed to say one of three things about it: Elvis, Genius, or Shakespeare.

few others have solved writerly marital strife so elegantly

Denis Johnson (what a madman, god bless him) said to us, "I don't love Graham Greene, I think I AM Graham Greene."

As a student at Iowa, Denis Johnson told me, he lived above the scientist who synthesized experimental psychedelics for the U of I. You can imagine how that went.

When he taught the class, Denis Johnson was pretty obsessed with how writers should avoid "is" (and other "to be" formulations) as much as possible. Which, of course, was not borne out by his own work at all.

many years after going clean, denis johnson took shrooms for a magazine piece to see how his style changed while on shrooms. turns out: not at all.

he turned it into great fiction, but i wouldn't want his harrowing life. for ex., denis johnson told a story about going on a 20-day silent retreat which ended with him so panicked that he set about wrecking his life for a year (including reporting suicidally in war-torn places)

the responses to this thread remind me that denis johnson was the (unspoken) consensus "great american writer" -- because he didn't (embarrassingly) bat hard for that position & because the work was full of blazing irregularities and eccentricity and leaping prose

he said (as he has perhaps said elsewhere) that 'tree of smoke' took 25 years to write