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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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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Things
Exhaustive
Dilettantes
Lots
Worry
Knowledge
Much
Something
Always
Dilettante

More quotes by 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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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!
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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 sort of a cavedweller: I miss my house, my yard, my kitchen, my wife. The trees. When I get home, I like to get down into my office neighborhood as soon as I can.
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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 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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You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that's what walking through New York on a June evening feels like - you feel like it's Friday and you're 17 years old.
John Darnielle
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From a very young age, I was the kind of kid you can just put anywhere and I'd still find stuff to be stoked about.
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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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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I grew up around some people whose parents toured a lot: tough on the marriage, tough on the kids.
John Darnielle
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I think it's a misconception that metal's about anger, obviously.
John Darnielle
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There's this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that.
John Darnielle