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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
Ideas
Conan
Everything
Arthur
Thing
Gentleman
Much
Plenty
Think
Read
Thinking
Idea
Else
Young
Doyle

More quotes by John Darnielle

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There are real teachers out there I don't pretend to have their mantle.
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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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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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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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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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I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice.
John Darnielle
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I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.
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
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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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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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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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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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There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.
John Darnielle
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Back in the 90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.
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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Life is hard, you're tired, and there's disease. The strategy that works for children is to be delighted by the things that delight you.
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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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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I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.
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