Top 33 John Darnielle Quotes

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.

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

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.

I think youth will always be connected to the strongest music at the time because… I don’t want to use the word ‘tribal,’ but there was this sort of familial affiliation that people would feel with the music they were listening to.

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.

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.

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

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you’re somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

‘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.

You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that’s what walking through New York on a June evening feels like – you feel like it’s Friday, and you’re 17 years old.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.’