Quote

The fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind.

John Darnielle

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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Real
Story
Heart
Less
Mind
Fact
Make
Experience
People
Facts
Doesn
Telling
Didn
Exist
Stories
Somebody

More quotes by John Darnielle

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If you're standing in the middle of a ring and you're playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that's real.
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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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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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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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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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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For me, moving is always a big opportunity. Its just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.
John Darnielle
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The South actually has a very strong tradition of activism. The civil rights movement came from down here! It was black activists demanding that their voices be heard. People say these are red states. No they're not!
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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Anything that is within you is a gift. To be able to take possession of that and say, Whatever it is, I am bigger than it, is to learn to cherish even the hard and painful things.
John Darnielle
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You can get into anything if you are determined. I always thought that with music, too.
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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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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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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It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.
John Darnielle
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Over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians.
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 don't celebrate milestones and I don't do anniversary editions. It's not my style to reflect on accomplishments.
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