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I was 14 or 15 when I discovered poetry, and I pretty much stopped writing prose until Master of Reality.

John Darnielle

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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Reality
Writing
Prose
Much
Stopped
Discovered
Master
Masters
Poetry
Pretty

More quotes by John Darnielle

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I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.
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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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Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power - almost dynastic - dating back many years.
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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.
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My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy.
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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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Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.
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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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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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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 grew up around some people whose parents toured a lot: tough on the marriage, tough on the kids.
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I seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated.
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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.
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People will complain that they don't want to wait around for lightning to strike, but why not? If you invest yourself in chance, the potential for disappointment is pretty low.
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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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Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.
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It's impossible to be content all the time - you have to learn to be content in places where you're unhappy and owning your emotions, whatever they are.
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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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It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.
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Human beings are selfish by nature. Everything that happens to a child, you immediately grab your own child and say, I will never let that happen to you.
John Darnielle