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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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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Way
Moments
Reader
Think
Need
Approach
Thinking
Hard
Question
Like
Feel
Answers
Frustrate
People
Feels
Happened
Explanations
Important
Forget
Mysteries
Needs
Whether
Explanation
Really
Moment
Mystery

More quotes by John Darnielle

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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 don't celebrate milestones and I don't do anniversary editions. It's not my style to reflect on accomplishments.
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Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.
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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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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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In death metal, a lot of guys are Eddie Van Halen disciples, but they take his style to really expressionistic places. It's a real pleasure for me to hear people pushing their craft.
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There are real teachers out there I don't pretend to have their mantle.
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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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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 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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Young people like to feel self-righteous, like they're on the right side of things.
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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.
John Darnielle
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I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.
John Darnielle
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Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens.
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In wrestling, people just throw each other around, possibly actually bleed, and are still friends in the locker room afterwards. But there's a real glee - a feeling goes up in the arena, especially on non-TV days. If it's just people in a room and somebody starts to bleed, that's very exciting.
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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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I couldn't name more than a couple of good drum'n'bass acts, and I have no idea what's big in the dance world right now.
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People say friends don't destroy one another. What do they know about friends?
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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.
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There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.
John Darnielle