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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.

John Darnielle

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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Moment
Claims
Helping
Cry
Moments
Fate
Way
Already
Staked
Life
Movies
Onscreen
People
Movie
Doomed
Everybody
Claim
Help
Appear

More quotes by John Darnielle

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I consider myself a lyricist first and foremost, but if you get something else out of what I do, that's fine too. I'm not sitting back here telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it.
John Darnielle
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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.
John Darnielle
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I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young, and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.
John Darnielle
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Human beings are selfish by nature. Everything that happens to a child, you immediately grab your own child and say, I will never let that happen to you.
John Darnielle
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I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.
John Darnielle
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I seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated.
John Darnielle
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It's impossible to be content all the time - you have to learn to be content in places where you're unhappy and owning your emotions, whatever they are.
John Darnielle
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People say friends don't destroy one another. What do they know about friends?
John Darnielle
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Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power - almost dynastic - dating back many years.
John Darnielle
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I just started writing stuff to kill time on summer evenings. This is why I'm always telling people who ask me what they need to do to succeed to give up, do something else.
John Darnielle
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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.
John Darnielle
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You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.
John Darnielle
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I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.
John Darnielle
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Back in the 90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.
John Darnielle
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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.
John Darnielle
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I was 14 or 15 when I discovered poetry, and I pretty much stopped writing prose until Master of Reality.
John Darnielle
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A novel is a performance you have to plan.
John Darnielle
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In death metal, a lot of guys are Eddie Van Halen disciples, but they take his style to really expressionistic places. It's a real pleasure for me to hear people pushing their craft.
John Darnielle
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When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.
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.
John Darnielle