John Darnielle Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart.
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Surreal fiction is a sophisticated art form. Events happen divorced from conventional logic, as events in a dream may happen. But unlike dreams, everything in the story contributes to an overall coherent point, impression or emotion.
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Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang; they repeat it, and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that's thrilling. That's when my pen flies.
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Basically hated everything made in the '80s, music television - it was really about the '90s for me. 'Encino Man' was a big hit. 'Robin Hood: Men in Tights.'
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It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.
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If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?
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But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been.
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I slept in van Gogh's bed. I worked in the room where he painted. I saw the place where he was cared for when he cut off his ear. I lived in the jail cell where he stayed. And I looked out the window. You remember that picture of the cornfields through the bars? That was what I saw.
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I think most of us sense that it is a responsibility of the humanities to try to help better the conduct of human beings in their lives and manifold professional activities.
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I think we have become obsessed with beauty and personally I'm really saddened by the way women mutilate their faces today in search of that.
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You would never say to a man, 'do you like playing strong men?' You just wouldn't say that.
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The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.
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I started missing acting when I was in school, and I realized after being in the business after however many years that I was really interested in film.
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The act of contemplation then creates the thing created.
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Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren't.
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We see a friend’s eye as one and indivisible. A stranger’s eye we take in part by part: the white, the iris, and the pupil.
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Republicans campaign like Libertarians and govern like Democrats.
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Like it or not, women are always subject to criticism if they show too much feeling in public.
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There is a lot that happens around the world we cannot control. We cannot stop earthquakes, we cannot prevent droughts, and we cannot prevent all conflict, but when we know where the hungry, the homeless and the sick exist, then we can help.
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When you are young, you are fervent about the things you believe in.
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I get offers all the time from film makers, but they are unknown quantities. I don't go there and do experiments.
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This world is mine for the taking, make me king!
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Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.
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My songs tend to sprint toward some epiphany and then explode.
