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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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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Marriage
Parents
Grew
Parent
Kids
Around
Toured
People
Tough
Whose

More quotes by 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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May we all emerge from winter with our strength renewed and any unwanted pieces left under the ice.
John Darnielle
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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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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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A novel is a performance you have to plan.
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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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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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I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.
John Darnielle
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I just started writing stuff to kill time on summer evenings. This is why I'm always telling people who ask me what they need to do to succeed to give up, do something else.
John Darnielle
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You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.
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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I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice.
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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Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.
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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It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.
John Darnielle
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Kayfabe is kind of a code. To break kayfabe is to let people know that the punch was not real and that the match was scripted.
John Darnielle
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It makes me envious of anybody who can say truly that they don't care what anybody thinks of what they do, because I care a lot about the people who like my stuff.
John Darnielle
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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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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