John Darnielle Quotes

You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

The only people who are afraid of file sharing are the people whose albums are so dull presentation-wise that nobody cares about owning the actual finished product, and the people who have so little connection to their listeners that said listeners have no reason to care whether the artists they like are getting reimbursed for their efforts.

There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

Good things never last, bad things never die.

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

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

A bands first albums usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.

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

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

Young people like to feel self-righteous, like they're on the right side of things.

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.

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

The moment where you know the thing you want is ridiculous and pompous and a terrible thing to want anyway. The direction in which you're headed is not the direction you want to go, yet you're going to head that way a while longer cause that's just the kind of person you are.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

People say friends don't destroy one another. What do they know about friends?

At 23, you can completely, literally reinvent yourself if you want to.

[Robert] Aikman would write horror stories that weren't gore, they weren't slashers, and they weren't monster stories either. He called them ghost stories. The main thing about them was the vibe. It was really disquieting. He wanted to sketch the scene so that you could see it and know the characters and get a feel for the motion - and then ask yourself why and not get a final answer. Leave something that itches. I loved that!

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I dont feel everybody can connect to.

I did a lot of music criticism. I don't think much of it was any good. I think I wanted to show off a lot when I was younger. Now I just want people to enjoy the story. If it were possible to publish anonymously, that would be awesome.

When you know where somebody is, you know the most important thing about them.