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 don't do very much for beauty. I use very simple things on my skin. I haven't got time. I would always get facials and then come home laden with product, and pay a lot of money and never use it. Anyway, one day a dermatologist told me to use Cetaphil to clean my face and as a moisturizer, and that's what I do.
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I say 'here's the thing' a lot, both to alert people that I'm about to say something important and to give myself a moment to figure out what that important thing might be, because my head is so often completely empty.
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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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I have never intimidated the masses... I only intimidate corrupt officials.
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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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Political union means transferring the prerogatives of national legislatures to the European parliament, which would then decide how to structure Europe's fiscal, banking, and monetary union.
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The act of contemplation then creates the thing created.
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For India, the links with the United States/Israel are the centrepiece of its foreign policy.
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Harvard prides itself on its diversity - economic, racial, social, geographical - but it remains intellectually segregated. It's not what conservative commentators seem to imagine - a bastion of liberal professors force-feeding radical opinions to a naive student body.
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To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.
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Some directors don't say much. Michael Mann, for example. I remember on 'The Insider' he never had much to say. He would do a scene, just kind of nod, and then set it up to do it again. And you might do a scene 10 or 12 times or more, the same little 31-second bit. And you could tell he wasn't satisfied, but he wouldn't say much.
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Even today every year we lose an awful lot of young people, teenagers, who take their own lives because they're - they are gay or transgender.
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My songs tend to sprint toward some epiphany and then explode.
