Darnielle Quotes & Sayings

People will complain that they don't want to wait around for lightning to strike, but why not? If you invest yourself in chance, the potential for disappointment is pretty low. — John Darnielle

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

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

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

I think I am a religious person just by nature. I think I sort of view everything through the lens of some inner undying thing in people that drives them to act as they do or to feel ashamed of not acting in some other way. — John Darnielle

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

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

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

My feminism is what came squarely up against my faith. There's a lot of ecstatic post-patriarchal Christians who have stuff they do with that. But at that point, you're doing Christianity with a double-superscript. The Bible, and especially the book of Genesis, is pretty unapologetically patriarchal. — John Darnielle

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

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

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. — John Darnielle

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

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

Life is entirely unthinkable without any of the creative arts, and they're all a continuum - the force in question is creativity, not its mode of expression. — John Darnielle

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

I think listening to a lot of Lou Reed when I was a teenager is what encouraged me to just sing however felt good to me. — John Darnielle

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

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

I remember this scene because it was embarrassing to live through it, and because remembering it is a way of knowing that I am half-true to my beliefs when the time comes. I sit silently defending them and I don't sell them out, but I put on a face that lets people think I'm on the winning team, that I'm laughing along with them instead of just standing among them. I save the best parts for myself and savor them in silence. Number three, power of flight. Number four, marauder. Enough vision to really see something. A stack of gold coins and a ledger. People want all kinds of things out of life, I knew early on. — John Darnielle

There are new monsters now. — John Darnielle

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. — John Darnielle

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

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. — John Darnielle

Songs are often character studies. — John Darnielle

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

That's what pictures are for, after all: to stand in place of the things that weren't left behind, to bear witness to people and places and things that might otherwise go unnoticed. — John Darnielle

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

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

I usually kind of can't wait until my records leak. Back in the day, you could give people tapes, but you can't do that anymore, because it would be available to everyone on the planet within an hour. — John Darnielle

The fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. — John Darnielle

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

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. — John Darnielle

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

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

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

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

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

There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die. — John Darnielle

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

Take dance music: I like enough of it and its history to be able to say a word or two about this or that record, but I'm nobody's authority. — John Darnielle

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

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

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

I hang out and sign records for an hour or two hours every night, and I like to hear as many people's stories as I can, because if somebody wants to share their story with me, I want to honor that. — John Darnielle

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

Silos are the great hidden constant of the industrialised world. — John Darnielle

If you show up to work five days in a row, nobody's going to pat you on the back - everyone does that. Well, do that with your writing. Just show up. Be there for it. When you get an idea, write it down somewhere and then be a steward of that idea. — John Darnielle

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

Music is a permanent art, it will always go through phases where you like it and are in tune with it, but saying that music "got bad" is infantile. The same is true with your life. — John Darnielle

People trying to help you when you're past help are raw and helpless. Nobody wins: you get nothing; they feel worse. — John Darnielle

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. — John Darnielle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People think of me as a nice person because, I think, I have grown into a nice person. — John Darnielle

Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive. — John Darnielle

Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jellyfish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past. — John Darnielle

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

That's what it is. That's what my morning was like: all these real physical heavy positive vibrations, the soul of this tape. The fuzzy groove. The meaning of it all, if it has one: All love, all the time. Peace and happiness in every day. Peace and happiness with cow blood dripping from your hands, bright blood staining your fingerprints because you didn't glove up since you don't normally do prep work. Peace and happiness when you're making a list of everything that's wrong with the world and squinting your eyes tight trying to imagine your way out of it. Peace, peace, peace, happiness, happiness, happiness. — John Darnielle

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

They don't know they have expectations, but I show them by counterexample what their expectations were. — John Darnielle

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

I thought about the guy in the truck, the focus in his expression, and I felt like I already knew enough of the story to tell it to somebody else maybe better than either of its major players could. — John Darnielle

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

What's funny is that people think, "Well there has to be something more than wrestling, because wrestling has such an absurd quality to it." But if you tell a love story, people don't ask what else is in there. They say, "Oh, it's just a love story." All stories have many levels, but these ones show their hand and say, "You might want to look a little deeper." — John Darnielle

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

Human beings are selfish by nature. Everything that happens to a child, you immediately grab your own child and say, "I will never let that happen to you." — John Darnielle

To me, everything is always new. People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded. — John Darnielle

I had this rising premonition about him turning to look over at me, catching me in the act of sort of staring at him for no reason. It was a premonition with texture and heft, something I could almost taste; in my mind I saw his head begin to turn, casually, gradually but decisively, until his eyes found mine and held them. I stood ready for this to happen, wondering what I'd do, but he stayed put. — John Darnielle

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

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

And then I went back into my room, locked into a sequence as perfect as a pattern, and I sat down on my great rock throne, invisible to the outside world but palpable beneath me, and from how my face felt I thought maybe I was crying, either because I didn't want to do this or because I did, it was hard to tell and anyway I never would, who would believe me in either case and who would be there to believe me in all cases, it was a puzzle, I had yet to learn the way of the jigsaw, and so I positioned the rifle beneath my chin, it feels cold, like an actual thing in the actual present physical world, OK, there it is, I am here now, and then I lay down on my belly and listened to the rising squall beyond the door. — John Darnielle

People have ideas and theories about coping with catastrophic injury, but most of them are based in practicalities. They're right in thinking that the practicalities - how will you live? what will you do? - are important, but these aren't the main thing. The main thing is what happens to your vision, how you're a little different after you've seen a few things, and as far as I know, nobody really gets this, — John Darnielle

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

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

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

The way the vocal folds work is that they can get inflamed and in pain, but actual tears in the folds are somewhat rare. I've never torn anything. Been too strained plenty of times. — John Darnielle

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

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

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

There is no identifiable accent here unless you've cultivated a very careful ear. This is an easy place to live, milder in feel than Nebraska to the west, negligibly warmer in the winter than Minnesota to the north, of less imagined consequence to the world than Illinois to the east or Missouri to the south. — John Darnielle