Quote

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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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Others
Give
Shelter
Giving
Imagined
Much
Worlds
World
Anywhere
Avoid
Outside
Seeing

More quotes by John Darnielle

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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.
John Darnielle
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I think The Sunset Tree is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.
John Darnielle
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I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.
John Darnielle
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If my songs are being listened to between any other songs, that is awesome, and I'm glad people are getting something out of them.
John Darnielle
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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.
John Darnielle
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It's easy to follow national politics and weigh in on social media, but if I'm tweeting stuff about Chatham County, no one cares.
John Darnielle
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I don't really have any position to complain about my job. Yeah, every job has its moments like, Ah, you know, it's Wednesday. But I'm blessed. I love my work.
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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People talk about songwriting or comedy as creative expression, but life is creative expression. Table-making, even nursing, is extraordinarily creative.
John Darnielle
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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.
John Darnielle
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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
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Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.
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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Not everybody relates to pain, but if you can watch other people playacting it, you can absorb some of that vibe. It's like watching horror movies - you want to have the experience, but in a safe environment.
John Darnielle
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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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I usually kind of can't wait until my records leak. Back in the day, you could give people tapes, but you can't do that anymore, because it would be available to everyone on the planet within an hour.
John Darnielle
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It's good to be young, but let's not kid ourselves/ It's better to pass on through those years and come out the other side/ With our hearts still beating/ Having stared down demons/ Come back breathing.
John Darnielle
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This is the funny thing about me. People think John just comes up with all the ideas. I'm honored. People think I have a big old brain, but actually I am the sum of the people I work with.
John Darnielle
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It's an important moment as a reader, I think, when you can forget the question of whether you need to know what happened. Some people really want hard explanations. I'm the other way. I like mysteries. I don't want to frustrate people. I don't want people to feel like they got no answers, but I want to approach the mystery and sit with it.
John Darnielle
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Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.
John Darnielle