John Darnielle quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Darnielle

John Darnielle Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Darnielle on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

And then I played some music, old music, and it sounded awful, and I loved it, I loved it so much.

I still get really excited looking at stuff that I've seen every day for 20 years.

It is hard to leave home, and sometimes it takes a long time. *

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

But people underestimate just how starved everybody is for some magic pathway back into childhood.

Working efficiently while a movie played was second nature to her by now, more comfortable than silence.

I imagined a quiet future in an imaginary world where nothing ever really happened but everything seemed charged with life.

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

Once you start talking to people, you find out there's a lot more wrestling fans than you think there are.

I seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated.

It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.

My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.

People say friends don't destroy one another - what do they know about friends?

God is present in the sweeping gesture, but the devil is in the details.

It's hard to overstate how deep the need can get for things to make sense.

My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy.

Everyone in my orbit would have a terrible day: the arbiter of days has decreed it.

Giving up and doing something else (nursing, for me) was exactly what eventually led me to making music that other people wanted to hear.

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.

Good things never last, bad things never die.

I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.

It's not my style to be thinking about what a record is while I'm making it: I just write songs.

I'll tell you later" is a contingent claim that can be rendered false by any of several moves.

I will go where I will go
And I will jettison all dead weight
And I will use these words for kindling
And I will sleep by the garden gate.

Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.

Silos are the great hidden constant of the industrialised world.

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.

To me, creative work is labor, like any other kind of labor. It's got value, and it takes your time, and it's useful to people, depending.

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.

I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice.

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

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.

The process of touring is always so weird to me. Once you've made the album, that's over, you move along.

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

The more I learn about stuff the more conscious I become of grave gaps in my knowledge.

There are new monsters now.

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.

People bring you books, cheap paperbacks, when you're in the hospital: this was how I found out that I hate mystery novels.

The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it's you, and that you're standing in the doorway.

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.

I write for a lot of places, so I'm on a lot of promo lists.

I think any real one-sheet for an album would say, 'Well, here's what I've been doing.' And that would be it.

A farmhouse has a way of feeling both timeless and impermanent without ever committing to either side.

I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much.

I come from Chino, so all your threats are empty.

It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.

I don't have a favorite drink. I don't do favorites of anything, practically.

People do all sorts of things impulsively and follow those impulses into strange places.

I'd played with Jon Wurster as a duo just for a lark.

It's hard always to say what it is one likes about a place, for me. I feel it.

One or two people have named their children after characters in my songs. That's pretty intense.

It's just being who you want to be, even if you are a poor kid making loud music
about being unhappy!

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

You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.

Either inventing internal worlds or having no world at all to inhabit,

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

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

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.

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.

I let the barren-void melody of his voice lilt its way through the inattentive chambers of my brain.

As an idea occurs to me, I'll either follow it or not, but I'm more instinctive than master-planner about stuff.

I crave music that'll sort of hurtle me into space and release me up there.

When you're born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you.

I still can't manage to keep a journal, and people have been telling me to since the fourth grade.

Sometimes I do 'So Desperate' solo in the middle of the set. I really love to sing that song.

You can get into anything if you are determined. I always thought that with music, too.

I was little the first time I heard the term "ghost town"; I fell immediately in love.

From a very young age, I was the kind of kid you can just put anywhere and I'd still find stuff to be stoked about.

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

Who knows the secrets of anybody's heart.

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.

One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.

I had a funny feeling that day, all day: something about how much I liked my life and where I was with it.

I watched 'Fame,' and I just love the choreography. It just gives me a place to be in another zone.

There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?

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

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

I don't sit down and say I'm going to write a song about this or that. They are never mapped out.

Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.

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.

I want to make sure people know I don't think I have any magic powers. I just have a story that I share.

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

Wrestling's a form of expression, and it expresses vastness.

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

Who doesn't want to rise above the obstacles in his pathway? Who wouldn't want to go down in flames?

I knew she wanted to ask what I was doing, but I had the advantage. Nobody liked to see me speak.

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.

think I was inspired by a commercial for an old board game called Stay Alive.

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.

I didn't have a whole lot of friends anyway, so I didn't feel abandoned so much as reminded.

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

Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don't feel everybody can connect to.

I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.

When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.

To me, the only good reason to be touring is if you still have something good to share instead of just revisiting past glories.

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

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

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