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I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young, and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.

John Darnielle

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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Everything
Arthur
Thing
Gentleman
Much
Plenty
Think
Read
Thinking
Idea
Else
Young
Doyle
Ideas
Conan

More quotes by John Darnielle

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You learn to present dark things without including their ability to harm, treasuring them for what they are.
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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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The more I learn about stuff the more conscious I become of grave gaps in my knowledge.
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I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.
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A novel is a performance you have to plan.
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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.
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My son, who sees me almost every day of his life, will look at me and go, I know that dude! I like that dude! It's incredibly affirming.
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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There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.
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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 grew up around some people whose parents toured a lot: tough on the marriage, tough on the kids.
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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.
John Darnielle
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It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.
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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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My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy.
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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The moment where you know the thing you want is ridiculous and pompous and a terrible thing to want anyway. The direction in which you're headed is not the direction you want to go, yet you're going to head that way a while longer cause that's just the kind of person you are.
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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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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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