John Darnielle Quotes

You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.

There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.

Life is hard, you're tired, and there's disease. The strategy that works for children is to be delighted by the things that delight you.

People talk about songwriting or comedy as creative expression, but life is creative expression. Table-making, even nursing, is extraordinarily creative.

Good things never last, bad things never die.

One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can.

I am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am.

There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

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.

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.

Young people like to feel self-righteous, like they're on the right side of things.

I seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated.

It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.

A bands first albums usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.

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.

You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.

I think listening to a lot of Lou Reed when I was a teenager is what encouraged me to just sing however felt good to me.

The studio's a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens.

I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.

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.

People say friends don't destroy one another. What do they know about friends?

At 23, you can completely, literally reinvent yourself if you want to.

The possibility of disaster remains horrific to me. Like when you know everything's about to go wrong in a way that's not controllable or knowable.

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.

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.

I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun.

I still get really excited looking at stuff that I've seen every day for 20 years.

Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.

Kayfabe is kind of a code. To break kayfabe is to let people know that the punch was not real and that the match was scripted.

If you get into a fight and somebody punches you, you get two feelings. One: That really hurts. Two: That relief in the realness of, like, Wow, this is what it is. It's not an intellectual process.

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.

Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people "crazy," we exclude them from our circle.

If my songs are being listened to between any other songs, that is awesome, and I'm glad people are getting something out of them.

It's a cliché to state that one should think like a child, but it's clear that kids know something that the world tries to make you unlearn later in life.

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.

The reality of having a kid involves day-to-day practicality - not broader philosophical outlooks.

You learn to present dark things without including their ability to harm, treasuring them for what they are.

I don't understand being idle; I don't have an idle setting. I probably should develop one.

When you know where somebody is, you know the most important thing about them.

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.

Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power - almost dynastic - dating back many years.

Our [former] governor [Pat McCrory] was supposed to be a moderate, but he found himself beholden to people who have much more draconian ideas. I think he assumed this stuff flew under the radar.

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."

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

I'm so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.

Giving up and doing something else (nursing, for me) was exactly what eventually led me to making music that other people wanted to hear.

I'm sort of a cavedweller: I miss my house, my yard, my kitchen, my wife. The trees. When I get home, I like to get down into my office neighborhood as soon as I can.

I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.

I do have a romantic interest in outlasting everybody else. There's a sort of sad machismo to singer-songwriters, I think.

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.