John Darnielle Quotes

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

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 grew up around some people whose parents toured a lot: tough on the marriage, tough on the kids.

I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.

I don't write my own publicity materials, I just read 'em and give 'em the OK.

For me, moving is always a big opportunity. Its just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.

I think The Sunset Tree is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.

Back in the 90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.

Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I dont feel everybody can connect to.

When you punish a person for dreaming his dreamDon't expect him to thank or forgive you.

And when the clouds do clear awayGet a momentary chance to seeThe thing I've been trying to beat to deathThe soft creature that I used to beThe better animal I used to be

It's in the nature of the landscape to change, and it's in the nature of people to help the process along...

Cool parents, I thought, are the ones who know nothing. It made me feel a little sad for mine, but I didn't say any of this.

Their boots were black and shiny and your treasures gleamed like stars, Bones from deep down in the fertile crescent.

My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn't yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly

Dark, primitive magic. Swords Against Death.

There are so many different kinds of ghosts.

I thought about the guy in the truck, the focus in his expression, and I felt like I already knew enough of the story to tell it to somebody else maybe better than either of its major players could.

Who knows the secrets of anybody’s heart.

Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself.

People like to say how much they like stuff, but with 'The Sunset Tree, ' people shared stories about what it meant for them. And that stuff's so humbling and amazing.

I think 'The Sunset Tree' is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.

Metal isn't necessarily aggressive. There's metal that's contemplative, there's metal that's sad, and there's metal that's exuberant. No genre is limited in what it can express.

I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.

Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.