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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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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
People
Exactly
Hear
Making
Else
Music
Wanted
Giving
Nursing
Something
Eventually

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy.
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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.
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From a very young age, I was the kind of kid you can just put anywhere and I'd still find stuff to be stoked about.
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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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I usually kind of can't wait until my records leak. Back in the day, you could give people tapes, but you can't do that anymore, because it would be available to everyone on the planet within an hour.
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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.
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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.
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If my songs are being listened to between any other songs, that is awesome, and I'm glad people are getting something out of them.
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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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I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much.
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It's hard always to say what it is one likes about a place, for me. I feel it.
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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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Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.
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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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Young people like to feel self-righteous, like they're on the right side of things.
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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.
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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.
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You can get into anything if you are determined. I always thought that with music, too.
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