Top 100 Darnielle Quotes
#1. Wolf in White Van is beautiful, enigmatic, and sad, and like every other brilliant thing John Darnielle has ever done, it seems to come from some fully imagined universe, of which we only get to see this haunting, enticing sliver. I utterly love it.
J. Robert Lennon
#2. I think in general in my teens I had a lot of crushes on men on the Internet, most notably Momus since I was in my late teens. John Darnielle was also another big crush.
Marie Calloway
#3. And then I played some music, old music, and it sounded awful, and I loved it, I loved it so much.
John Darnielle
#4. Touring is just not normal for me. My personality is to never ever talk to people if I can help it.
John Darnielle
#6. 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
#7. It's hard always to say what it is one likes about a place, for me. I feel it.
John Darnielle
#8. For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing.
John Darnielle
#9. 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
#10. 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.
John Darnielle
#11. 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
#12. My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy.
John Darnielle
#13. This is why improvisational music and comedy is so inspiring: You are seeing something being born, and that energy, there is no substitute for. These songs, most of them, are about a minute old when you hear them.
John Darnielle
#14. 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
#15. Who doesn't want to rise above the obstacles in his pathway? Who wouldn't want to go down in flames?
John Darnielle
#16. 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
#17. Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.
John Darnielle
#18. 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
#19. More and more, I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice. In death metal, a lot of guys are Eddie Van Halen disciples, but they take his style to really expressionistic places. It's a real pleasure for me to hear people pushing their craft.
John Darnielle
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. The studio's a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens.
John Darnielle
#23. I do have a romantic interest in outlasting everybody else. There's a sort of sad machismo to singer-songwriters, I think.
John Darnielle
#24. I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice.
John Darnielle
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. No way of counting my blessings. No way for anyone to count that high.
John Darnielle
#28. I knew she wanted to ask what I was doing, but I had the advantage. Nobody liked to see me speak.
John Darnielle
#29. 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
#30. I don't have a favorite drink. I don't do favorites of anything, practically.
John Darnielle
#31. I don't celebrate milestones and I don't do anniversary editions. It's not my style to reflect on accomplishments.
John Darnielle
#32. This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody's doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.
John Darnielle
#34. 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.
John Darnielle
#35. I write for a lot of places, so I'm on a lot of promo lists.
John Darnielle
#36. Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don't feel everybody can connect to.
John Darnielle
#37. The reality of having a kid involves day-to-day practicality - not broader philosophical outlooks.
John Darnielle
#38. I used to assume no one would care, but I do think now I've written songs that are useful to people having dark hours.
John Darnielle
#39. I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun. But I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.
John Darnielle
#40. 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.
John Darnielle
#41. It's just being who you want to be, even if you are a poor kid making loud music
about being unhappy!
John Darnielle
#42. 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
#43. My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.
John Darnielle
#44. 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.
John Darnielle
#45. As an idea occurs to me, I'll either follow it or not, but I'm more instinctive than master-planner about stuff.
John Darnielle
#46. 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.
John Darnielle
#47. You get this really cool groove when you're playing just piano, bass, and drums where everyone's sort of feeling each other's space, which is the only way to put it, but it really is true, and everyone's sort of sitting in their own pocket. It's kind of jazz-like.
John Darnielle
#48. I imagined a quiet future in an imaginary world where nothing ever really happened but everything seemed charged with life.
John Darnielle
#49. It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.
John Darnielle
#50. I am heavy in his arms, and I feel safe there, but I am lost, and I need constantly to be shoring up the wall that holds my emotions at bay, or I will feel something too great to contain.
John Darnielle
#51. I wish they'd conduct a national poll to find out who feels out of place and who doesn't. Just to get the numbers, you know? To get a feel for how many of us there are.
John Darnielle
#52. 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
#53. Some things are hard to explain to your parents. Some things are hard to explain, period, but your parents especially are never going to understand them.
John Darnielle
#54. One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.
John Darnielle
#55. You could hear, in the questions they asked and how they asked them, that there were right answers, things they wanted to hear.
John Darnielle
#56. They were smoking cigarettes in the deliberate self-conscious way of smoking teenagers:
John Darnielle
#57. I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.
John Darnielle
#58. I watched 'Fame,' and I just love the choreography. It just gives me a place to be in another zone.
John Darnielle
#59. Metal has its own code of cool, but it's not really trying to be cool. And that was very refreshing to me, that metal is very much about expressing something that seems awesome to you even if, at the time, much of the world was going to mock and reject it.
John Darnielle
#60. One or two people have named their children after characters in my songs. That's pretty intense.
John Darnielle
#61. 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
#62. I grew up around some people whose parents toured a lot: tough on the marriage, tough on the kids.
John Darnielle
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much.
John Darnielle
#66. God is present in the sweeping gesture, but the devil is in the details.
John Darnielle
#67. Just Tits over and over. During tests it sounded like a forest at night in the classroom. Voices rising singly or several at a time from the focused quiet. Tits. Tits. Titssss.
John Darnielle
#68. 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
#69. I know there must be other navigable paths where either nothing happens, that night or later, or where, when the idea to just pull the curtain on most things and then on everything, just because crosses my mind, I let the moment pass, and I go to sleep like everyone else did on my street that night.
John Darnielle
#70. I think 'The Sunset Tree' is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.
John Darnielle
#71. 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
#72. Sometimes I do 'So Desperate' solo in the middle of the set. I really love to sing that song.
John Darnielle
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. I was little the first time I heard the term "ghost town"; I fell immediately in love.
John Darnielle
#76. 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.
John Darnielle
#77. I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.
John Darnielle
#78. Wrestling is like any form of drama or pretty much any form of entertainment - some people understand this about forms of entertainment really intuitively when they're younger, and others would have to be really not very intelligent for a long time until we realize that every human mood is an art.
John Darnielle
#79. A farmhouse has a way of feeling both timeless and impermanent without ever committing to either side.
John Darnielle
#80. Wrestlers give their bodies to their work. I don't know if I like the word 'crazy' here. What I would say is there are people who have a different relationship to their bodies than most people.
John Darnielle
#81. I just started going to shows. I don't know how submerged I am: I feel guilty that I don't get out more, but I really like being inside the house.
John Darnielle
#82. Younger songwriters will ask me, 'What did you do?' And it's like, 'Well, I worked a day job, and I didn't stake anything. I didn't quit my day job. I didn't have any hopes at all. I just did the thing that I believed in, and I waited a long time.'
John Darnielle
#83. There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.
John Darnielle
#84. 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.
John Darnielle
#85. Silos are the great hidden constant of the industrialised world.
John Darnielle
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.
John Darnielle
#89. If I go see a band, and they play, like, zero from any of their old albums, I'm very happy about that. I do not want to see the bands of my youth playing the songs of my youth. I hate that.
John Darnielle
#90. 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
#91. I think it's a misconception that metal's about anger, obviously.
John Darnielle
#92. 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.
John Darnielle
#93. I wrote 'Lakeside View Apartment Suites' with Roman in my arms. He was about a month old. I was playing left-handed and finally handed him over. On the demo of it, you can hear him crying in the next room.
John Darnielle
#94. A book is a journey: It's a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader's experience of a book is going to be different.
John Darnielle
#95. 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
#96. A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?
John Darnielle
#97. I got a promo of 'Nichts Muss' in what would have been 2002 or 2003 and fell totally in love with it after listening to it on an airplane that took me to Australia via Taipei and Kuala Lumpur.
John Darnielle
#98. 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
#99. Giving up and doing something else (nursing, for me) was exactly what eventually led me to making music that other people wanted to hear.
John Darnielle
#100. 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
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