Quote

Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens.

John Darnielle

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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Look
Rocks
Book
Hold
Looks
Hand
Good
Books
Angle
Like
Sense
Lights
Happens
Throw
Hands
Various
Light
Window

More quotes by John Darnielle

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The moment where you know the thing you want is ridiculous and pompous and a terrible thing to want anyway. The direction in which you're headed is not the direction you want to go, yet you're going to head that way a while longer cause that's just the kind of person you are.
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You learn to present dark things without including their ability to harm, treasuring them for what they are.
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The possibility of disaster remains horrific to me. Like when you know everything's about to go wrong in a way that's not controllable or knowable.
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A novel is a performance you have to plan.
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Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power - almost dynastic - dating back many years.
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I don't like to say, Oh, I don't like this kind of music. I like to listen to it and try to see what people who like it get out of it.
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I think it's a misconception that metal's about anger, obviously.
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There are stylists I really love. I'm a huge Joan Didion fan - if I wrote something that she might like, then I'd feel very proud. I want the action to move as quickly as it does in A Book of Common Prayer, where one thing bonks right into another very quickly.
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The more I learn about stuff the more conscious I become of grave gaps in my knowledge.
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Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.
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In wrestling, people just throw each other around, possibly actually bleed, and are still friends in the locker room afterwards. But there's a real glee - a feeling goes up in the arena, especially on non-TV days. If it's just people in a room and somebody starts to bleed, that's very exciting.
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I'm so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.
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It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.
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Kayfabe is kind of a code. To break kayfabe is to let people know that the punch was not real and that the match was scripted.
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While writing is a mystical process, it's also work. If you show up to work five days in a row, nobody's going to pat you on the back - everyone does that. Well, do that with your writing. Just show up. Be there for it. When you get an idea, write it down somewhere and then be a steward of that idea.
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This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.
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The only people who are afraid of file sharing are the people whose albums are so dull presentation-wise that nobody cares about owning the actual finished product, and the people who have so little connection to their listeners that said listeners have no reason to care whether the artists they like are getting reimbursed for their efforts.
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I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.
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Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I dont feel everybody can connect to.
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It's hard always to say what it is one likes about a place, for me. I feel it.
John Darnielle