Top 100 John Darnielle Quotes
#1. And then I played some music, old music, and it sounded awful, and I loved it, I loved it so much.
John Darnielle
#2. Touring is just not normal for me. My personality is to never ever talk to people if I can help it.
John Darnielle
#4. My strongest hope is for a cameo as a band playing in a club visited by the detectives on 'Law & Order: SVU' during the course of an investigation, maybe during sound check, or something, so they can force us to stop playing while they question the sound guy.
John Darnielle
#5. Here and there, alone, reflecting, I'd bump up against what felt like a buffer zone between me and some vast reserve of grief, but its reinforcements were sturdy enough and its construction solid enough to prevent me from really ever smelling its air, feeling its wind on my face.
John Darnielle
#6. You want the song to be at least at the same level of goodness throughout. Whereas with something you're doing live, a song dips and rises and that can actually be worked to the song's benefit.
John Darnielle
#7. Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it's discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I'm at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy - you build yourself little worlds to enjoy.
John Darnielle
#8. I hope I get to watch porn with you, Abs?" he said, eyebrows up. "Am I hearing this right? I just want to make sure I understand what it is you imagine I'm thinking." She
John Darnielle
#9. I know the Bible pretty well. I'm not one of those guys who can immediately start quoting every book, but usually I know where to look to find certain themes.
John Darnielle
#10. I pretty much just focus on making the records - unless I'm self-releasing them; then I do my own thing. But at some point, you have to stop worrying about chains of distribution, or it takes out of your time to write.
John Darnielle
#11. I didn't feel like I'd really won anything, but I had come through the day no worse off than I'd come into it, which, as I have been telling myself for many years now, is a victory whether it feels like one or not.
John Darnielle
#12. I do have a romantic interest in outlasting everybody else. There's a sort of sad machismo to singer-songwriters, I think.
John Darnielle
#13. I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work, and it creates this strange connection.
John Darnielle
#14. Your creativity before it gets formed into words and songs is the actual substance. No one else can see it, right? Unless you give it the shape of a song or a painting or whatever.
John Darnielle
#15. I knew she wanted to ask what I was doing, but I had the advantage. Nobody liked to see me speak.
John Darnielle
#16. The more established you are, the less likely you are to do something ridiculous, which is one reason I'm proud to put out a wrestling album. If you stop and you go, 'Well, what if people don't like it?,' if you're already established in what you do, that'll strike fear into your heart.
John Darnielle
#17. I don't have a favorite drink. I don't do favorites of anything, practically.
John Darnielle
#18. I don't celebrate milestones and I don't do anniversary editions. It's not my style to reflect on accomplishments.
John Darnielle
#20. I write for a lot of places, so I'm on a lot of promo lists.
John Darnielle
#21. The reality of having a kid involves day-to-day practicality - not broader philosophical outlooks.
John Darnielle
#22. It's just being who you want to be, even if you are a poor kid making loud music
about being unhappy!
John Darnielle
#23. Anger is preverbal, so, by the time you're using words to express an angry feeling, you're already imposing loads of structure on that primal experience.
John Darnielle
#24. I want to make sure people know I don't think I have any magic powers. I just have a story that I share.
John Darnielle
#25. They were smoking cigarettes in the deliberate self-conscious way of smoking teenagers:
John Darnielle
#26. I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.
John Darnielle
#27. I watched 'Fame,' and I just love the choreography. It just gives me a place to be in another zone.
John Darnielle
#28. I always assumed people wanted to hear me tell stories, but then I had 'The Sunset Tree.' It turned out, my own stories were the ones that registered with people the hardest.
John Darnielle
#29. 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.
John Darnielle
#30. I think any real one-sheet for an album would say, 'Well, here's what I've been doing.' And that would be it.
John Darnielle
#31. Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.
John Darnielle
#32. I love Joan Didion, but I love her writing. I don't think meeting her could solve my problems or make me understand the world better.
John Darnielle
#33. Sometimes I do 'So Desperate' solo in the middle of the set. I really love to sing that song.
John Darnielle
#34. 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.
John Darnielle
#35. Sometimes I feel very young, and other times I feel like the side of a ship that's got a bunch of layers of mussels and barnacles on it.
John Darnielle
#36. A farmhouse has a way of feeling both timeless and impermanent without ever committing to either side.
John Darnielle
#37. I write stuff down. I have a chalkboard in the kitchen where I will scrawl stuff down if I have a faint outline of an idea. And I'll go into my office or whatever. But that goes from format to format.
John Darnielle
#38. It's impossible to be content all the time - you have to learn to be content in places where you're unhappy and owning your emotions, whatever they are.
John Darnielle
#39. I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.
John Darnielle
#40. I am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am.
John Darnielle
#41. You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.
John Darnielle
#42. To the left, just past the painting, on the other side of the hall, is the bathroom, the sort of open door that if cameras found it as they passed through the house in a horror movie would trigger a blast of synthesizers.
John Darnielle
#43. I take the knife and stab myself in the neck. I bleed out on top of the fortune-teller's grave and then I'm dead and that's my game. I am OK and I'll be OK but this is the end and this is my story. CH.
John Darnielle
#44. Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.
John Darnielle
#45. 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.
John Darnielle
#46. 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.
John Darnielle
#47. It isn't really much of a mystery, this occasional need I have to comfort my father. I did something terrible to his son once.
John Darnielle
#48. People say friends don't destroy one another - what do they know about friends?
John Darnielle
#49. For me, fiction isn't very cathartic. It can be a broad, long catharsis, but it's a whole different thing - whereas music is physical. Essentially, it goes in through your ear. Fiction is cerebral, necessarily. It can do emotional stuff. But they don't really compare - not for me.
John Darnielle
#50. 'Heel Turn 2' is about a person who's in a match, and he's playing as though the match were real. But it is real! 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.
John Darnielle
#51. A song is fire. You react to it primally, instantly. You don't have to decide whether you like it, and you don't really have to sit down and think about it much after you're done listening to it. It really does run through you like wind.
John Darnielle
#52. I was a huge comic book fan. It's weird because the era of 'Marvel' I was into turns out to be very important in the long run, but it's not the one that anybody romanticizes.
John Darnielle
#53. Forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling. It becomes a word you hear in the same way that people who associate sound with color might hear a flat sky-blue. The open sky through which forgotten satellites travel. Forever.
John Darnielle
#54. The more I learn about stuff the more conscious I become of grave gaps in my knowledge.
John Darnielle
#56. I let the barren-void melody of his voice lilt its way through the inattentive chambers of my brain.
John Darnielle
#57. I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.
John Darnielle
#58. There are planets so far away from ours that no scientist will ever guess that they exits, let alone know the stories of their civilizations, their beginnings and ends. They're not being kept secret from us, but they're secret all the same.
John Darnielle
#59. I'd played with Jon Wurster as a duo just for a lark.
John Darnielle
#60. 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
John Darnielle
#61. Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself.
John Darnielle
#63. As an artist, you always have to be growing. You don't just want to do what you already know people like.
John Darnielle
#64. You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.
John Darnielle
#65. Sometimes I'll write without the guitar or the piano, but most of the time I'll be playing and just improvising some words. And when I get something that sounds good, a line with a story in it, I'll try and tease it out and figure out where the story is going.
John Darnielle
#66. I used to break three or four strings a night, and the show would be over because I didn't know how to change the strings.
John Darnielle
#67. Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.
John Darnielle
#68. I didn't have a whole lot of friends anyway, so I didn't feel abandoned so much as reminded.
John Darnielle
#69. I couldn't name more than a couple of good drum'n'bass acts, and I have no idea what's big in the dance world right now.
John Darnielle
#70. When the last days come
We shall see visions
More vivid than sunsets
Brighter than stars
We will recognize each other
And see ourselves for the first time
The way we really are
John Darnielle
#71. When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.
John Darnielle
#72. The better I get at writing songs, the harder it seems to be to relate to people. But when I get on stage, I'm extremely happy.
John Darnielle
#74. I expected him to leave then, because it always seems to me like nothing ever happens, but something did happen: he began to back up.
John Darnielle
#75. Not everybody wants to get out and see the world. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you just want to figure out how to fit yourself into the world you already know.
John Darnielle
#76. I think the self is complicated, that at various times we are all various people, and wrestling actually does a lot with that. You have things like heel turns where a person goes from being a good guy to a bad guy.
John Darnielle
#77. I've written a lot about southern California, but I don't use the same characters. Leave the people in the songs in the songs, is my philosophy.
John Darnielle
#78. 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.
John Darnielle
#79. Back in the '90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.
John Darnielle
#80. When you punish a person for dreaming his dream
Don't expect him to thank or forgive you.
John Darnielle
#81. At 23, you can completely, literally reinvent yourself if you want to.
John Darnielle
#82. To me, the only good reason to be touring is if you still have something good to share instead of just revisiting past glories.
John Darnielle
#83. Readings are more like weaving a tapestry. Possibly people are getting a cathartic release - but music is physical. Music pummels you. It's got a beat; it's loud. Whereas this is more cerebral.
John Darnielle
#84. People do all sorts of things impulsively and follow those impulses into strange places.
John Darnielle
#85. That's what I used to enjoy so much: Bringing a record home, having it arrive in the mailbox. Having the whole experience of hearing it as you're holding it and looking at it and reading the liner notes, if they're anything.
John Darnielle
#86. 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.
John Darnielle
#87. They don't know they have expectations, but I show them by counterexample what their expectations were.
John Darnielle
#88. Every place on earth has a frequency. It's not good or bad, it's just the way it is, and if you can attune yourself to that frequency, then you can find comfort in that.
John Darnielle
#89. I always want to try and see what the appeal is in anything. It's the healthiest and most honest approach.
John Darnielle
#90. Their boots were black and shiny and your treasures gleamed like stars,
Bones from deep down in the fertile crescent.
John Darnielle
#91. I think, taking too long to work on a record, you sort of lose some of the feeling, so I write as fast as I can; it's just this manic phase where I'm by myself and or on tour, and I write, and I write.
John Darnielle
#92. think I was inspired by a commercial for an old board game called Stay Alive.
John Darnielle
#93. It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.
John Darnielle
#94. A band's first album's usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.
John Darnielle
#95. People trying to help you when you're past help are raw and helpless. Nobody wins: you get nothing; they feel worse.
John Darnielle
#96. For me, moving is always a big opportunity. It's just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.
John Darnielle
#97. The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it's you, and that you're standing in the doorway.
John Darnielle
#98. Working efficiently while a movie played was second nature to her by now, more comfortable than silence.
John Darnielle
#99. I crave music that'll sort of hurtle me into space and release me up there.
John Darnielle
#100. I think wrestling is the one that presents theater for people who want to see some theater but don't necessarily have to dress up or be quiet while they're watching.
John Darnielle
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