I don't understand being idle; I don't have an idle setting. I probably should develop one.
John DarnielleI am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am.
John DarnielleIf you're standing in the middle of a ring and you're playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that's real.
John DarnielleIt'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 DarnielleThere's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.
John Darnielle