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
Story
Occur
Whatever
Pull
Happens
Images
Stories
Details
Real
Starting
Writing
Instead
Going
Happen
Make
Start

More quotes by 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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You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.
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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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May we all emerge from winter with our strength renewed and any unwanted pieces left under the ice.
John Darnielle
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People will complain that they don't want to wait around for lightning to strike, but why not? If you invest yourself in chance, the potential for disappointment is pretty low.
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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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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One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can.
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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Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.
John Darnielle
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You learn to present dark things without including their ability to harm, treasuring them for what they are.
John Darnielle
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My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy.
John Darnielle
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There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.
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
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Giving up and doing something else (nursing, for me) was exactly what eventually led me to making music that other people wanted to hear.
John Darnielle
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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.
John Darnielle
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Young people like to feel self-righteous, like they're on the right side of things.
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 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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Every place on earth has a frequency. It's not good or bad, it's just the way it is, and if you can attune yourself to that frequency, then you can find comfort in that.
John Darnielle