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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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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Work
Alienated
Depressed
Angry
Seem
Seems
Best

More quotes by 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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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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You learn to present dark things without including their ability to harm, treasuring them for what they are.
John Darnielle
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I don't really have any position to complain about my job. Yeah, every job has its moments like, Ah, you know, it's Wednesday. But I'm blessed. I love my work.
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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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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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
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Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.
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 enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice.
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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In wrestling, people just throw each other around, possibly actually bleed, and are still friends in the locker room afterwards. But there's a real glee - a feeling goes up in the arena, especially on non-TV days. If it's just people in a room and somebody starts to bleed, that's very exciting.
John Darnielle
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I think it's a misconception that metal's about anger, obviously.
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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Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.
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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When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, but current horror books were harder to get your hands on.
John Darnielle
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While writing is a mystical process, it's also work. If you show up to work five days in a row, nobody's going to pat you on the back - everyone does that. Well, do that with your writing. Just show up. Be there for it. When you get an idea, write it down somewhere and then be a steward of that idea.
John Darnielle
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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