John Darnielle Quotes

I don't like to say, "Oh, I don't like this kind of music." I like to listen to it and try to see what people who like it get out of it.

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.

People want you to play the songs they know. I try not to reflect too much, and I don't really like to focus too much on myself.

People always talk about good time rock and roll, Chuck Berry or whatever, like this liberating force for feeling good. But what I need in my life is to be liberated into feeling bad. Not sad. I have plenty of sad. What I need is a place where I can spray anger in sparks like a gnarled piece of electrical cable. Just be mad at stuff and soak in the helplessness.

As an artist, you always have to be growing. You don't just want to do what you already know people like.

When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, but current horror books were harder to get your hands on.

I consider myself a lyricist first and foremost, but if you get something else out of what I do, that's fine too. I'm not sitting back here telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like 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.

Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.

When I was kid, they always used to tell me to keep notebooks. I look at my shelves now and it's just nothing but notebooks. And if I haven't gotten an idea but I have time to work, I'll pull one out and I bet there will be five or six sentences that will kick me off.

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.

This is the funny thing about me. People think John just comes up with all the ideas. I'm honored. People think I have a big old brain, but actually I am the sum of the people I work with.

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

Not everybody relates to pain, but if you can watch other people playacting it, you can absorb some of that vibe. It's like watching horror movies - you want to have the experience, but in a safe environment.

North Carolina was on the vanguard of being for [ trans rights ], and that's why we're seeing this push back. The conservatives noticed that there had been a lot of progress and they tried to tamp it down.

My family, before the divorce, moved several times, and after that we moved a whole bunch more times, and so I don't have an anchor to a single place. Probably as a result of that, I'm a little more attenuated to when people do feel close identification to place, whether they say it out aloud or not. I think that there's a sort of local patriotism that is deeper than national patriotism.

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

There'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.

What's scary is the unknown, the stuff you can't put your finger on.

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

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

I don't celebrate milestones and I don't do anniversary editions. It's not my style to reflect on accomplishments.

If 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.

I am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea - I put other things aside.

There are so many ways to respond to music besides feeling like someone's communicating with you. It gives me a charge.

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

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.

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

I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren't any good and I kinda knew it.

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.

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.

Labor for a lot of people has a negative connotation. But not for me. I always want to be working.

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

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.

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

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.

The South actually has a very strong tradition of activism. The civil rights movement came from down here! It was black activists demanding that their voices be heard. People say these are red states. No they're not!

I know it's a cliché to say I write for myself, but I write for myself.

Normal adult shopping is something I will never actually do, because it's no more possible for me to go shopping like normal adults do than it is for a man with no legs to wake up one day and walk. I can't miss shopping like you'd miss things you once had. I miss it in a different way. I miss it like you would miss a train.

It'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.

I like a lot of hardcore, but it's just a genre about which I don't have much to say. It's kind of a thing where, unless you're active in the hardcore community, what could you have to say of value about it? It resists criticism because it's not just a style but an entrance into several different worlds of ideas- political, philosophical, societal. The music is really only part of the whole scene. In that sense, the music doesn't change much because it shouldn't: It needs to be there as a signal that you're entering into a certain discursive mode, maybe.

In wrestling, people just throw each other around, possibly actually bleed, and are still friends in the locker room afterwards. But there's a real glee - a feeling goes up in the arena, especially on non-TV days. If it's just people in a room and somebody starts to bleed, that's very exciting.

When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.

Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.

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

Over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians.