Quote

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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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Time
Else
Evening
People
Give
Telling
Need
Summer
Giving
Kill
Needs
Succeed
Writing
Started
Something
Asks
Always
Stuff
Evenings

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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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This is the funny thing about me. People think John just comes up with all the ideas. I'm honored. People think I have a big old brain, but actually I am the sum of the people I work with.
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There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.
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I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice.
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It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.
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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'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.
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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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I'm so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.
John Darnielle
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Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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People talk about songwriting or comedy as creative expression, but life is creative expression. Table-making, even nursing, is extraordinarily creative.
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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