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I suspect by the time the Beatles were writing the White Album, they didn't go, 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand!' I wanna play that! It's like if somebody asked you to put on the clothes you wore in high school. Well, no. No!

John Darnielle

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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Play
Hand
Suspects
Writing
High
Wanna
Time
White
Album
Like
Didn
Albums
Hands
Asked
School
Clothes
Beatles
Wells
Hold
Wore
Well
Somebody
Suspect

More quotes by John Darnielle

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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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I seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated.
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Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.
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The more I learn about stuff the more conscious I become of grave gaps in my knowledge.
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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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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.
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A novel is a performance you have to plan.
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It's easy to follow national politics and weigh in on social media, but if I'm tweeting stuff about Chatham County, no one cares.
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Over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians.
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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.
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People say friends don't destroy one another. What do they know about friends?
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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.
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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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It's good to be young, but let's not kid ourselves/ It's better to pass on through those years and come out the other side/ With our hearts still beating/ Having stared down demons/ Come back breathing.
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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.
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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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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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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The reality of having a kid involves day-to-day practicality - not broader philosophical outlooks.
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The process of touring is always so weird to me. Once you've made the album, that's over, you move along.
John Darnielle