Quote

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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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Real
Starting
Writing
Instead
Going
Happen
Make
Start
Story
Occur
Whatever
Pull
Happens
Images
Stories
Details

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 reality of having a kid involves day-to-day practicality - not broader philosophical outlooks.
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 seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated.
John Darnielle
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Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people crazy, we exclude them from our circle.
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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Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power - almost dynastic - dating back many years.
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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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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Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.
John Darnielle
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A novel is a performance you have to plan.
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 enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice.
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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I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much.
John Darnielle
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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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I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun.
John Darnielle
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It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.
John Darnielle
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I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.
John Darnielle
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I'm so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.
John Darnielle