110+ John Darnielle Quotes On Folk, Storytelling And Poetry

John Darnielle is an American singer-songwriter and musician. He is best known as the primary member of the American indie folk band The Mountain Goats. He is also a novelist, having published the novel Wolf in White Van in 2014. Following is our collection on famous quotes by John Darnielle on love, folk, storytelling.

Top 10 John Darnielle Quotes

1. You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.
2. People talk about songwriting or comedy as creative expression, but life is creative expression. Table-making, even nursing, is extraordinarily creative.
3. 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.
4. I seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated.
5. 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.
6. Young people like to feel self-righteous, like they're on the right side of things.
7. I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.
8. 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.
9. I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.
10. At 23, you can completely, literally reinvent yourself if you want to.

John Darnielle Short Quotes

• I'm so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.
• I think it's a misconception that metal's about anger, obviously.
• You can get into anything if you are determined. I always thought that with music, too.
• It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.
• I don't understand being idle; I don't have an idle setting. I probably should develop one.
• The reality of having a kid involves day-to-day practicality - not broader philosophical outlooks.
• I still get really excited looking at stuff that I've seen every day for 20 years.
• People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded.
• When you know where somebody is, you know the most important thing about them.
• I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice.

John Darnielle Quotes About Love

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

I don't really have any position to complain about my job. Yeah, every job has its moments like, "Ah, you know, it's Wednesday." But I'm blessed. I love my work. — John Darnielle

There are stylists I really love. I'm a huge Joan Didion fan - if I wrote something that she might like, then I'd feel very proud. I want the action to move as quickly as it does in A Book of Common Prayer, where one thing bonks right into another very quickly. — John Darnielle

John Darnielle Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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. — John Darnielle

People don't tend to notice, but in the past 10 years especially there's been a lot of growth in how I write songs and what goes into them. You can listen to Mountain Goats from 1991 to 2007 and never hear a seventh chord. In 2007 or 2008, I started working on the piano to grow as a songwriter. I started throwing major sevens in and sixes and more interesting stuff. — 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

I have a hunger for justice, but art is a place I've always enjoyed being able to be free - to live in worlds that you don't have to be thinking about that all the time. I don't see myself writing Upton Sinclair books. My books are to entertain, although to me, entertainment is to make you feel sadness or to get in touch with your own pain - or fear, or to remember somebody who has gone missing from your life. That's my calling. — John Darnielle

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Dennis] Etchison would write stories that were just punch lines at the end. You wouldn't realize something horrific was happening until the last paragraph. — 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

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

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

While writing is a mystical process, it's also work. 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

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

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

My family, before the divorce, moved several times, and after that we moved a whole bunch more times, and so I don't have an anchor to a single place. Probably as a result of that, I'm a little more attenuated to when people do feel close identification to place, whether they say it out aloud or not. I think that there's a sort of local patriotism that is deeper than national patriotism. — John Darnielle

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. — John Darnielle

I don't like to say, "Oh, I don't like this kind of music." I like to listen to it and try to see what people who like it get out of it. — John Darnielle

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

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. — John Darnielle

It's a cliché to state that one should think like a child, but it's clear that kids know something that the world tries to make you unlearn later in life. — John Darnielle

Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen. — John Darnielle

May we all emerge from winter with our strength renewed and any unwanted pieces left under the ice. — John Darnielle

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. — 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

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. — John Darnielle

When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, but current horror books were harder to get your hands on. — 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. And I send them to the guys, and we start planning our studio ventures. — John Darnielle

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

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. — John Darnielle

I worked the AV counter at the Roland Heights public library in the '80s. My best story from the library was the time a couple asked for a recommendation, and I recommended Raising Arizona and they absolutely hated it. They came back hungry for blood. I was on my lunch break and my boss came out and said, "Hey kid, you need to come talk to these people. They totally hate Arizona." And he said, "Arizona's a dog; nobody gets that movie." — John Darnielle

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

Our [former] governor [Pat McCrory] was supposed to be a moderate, but he found himself beholden to people who have much more draconian ideas. I think he assumed this stuff flew under the radar. — 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

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

Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power - almost dynastic - dating back many years. — John Darnielle

I was 14 or 15 when I discovered poetry, and I pretty much stopped writing prose until Master of Reality. — John Darnielle

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

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

Over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians. — 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

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

In wrestling, people just throw each other around, possibly actually bleed, and are still friends in the locker room afterwards. But there's a real glee - a feeling goes up in the arena, especially on non-TV days. If it's just people in a room and somebody starts to bleed, that's very exciting. — John Darnielle

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

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

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

You learn to present dark things without including their ability to harm, treasuring them for what they are. — 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

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

I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun. — John Darnielle

This is the funny thing about me. People think John just comes up with all the ideas. I'm honored. People think I have a big old brain, but actually I am the sum of the people I work with. — John Darnielle

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

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. — 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

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

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

When I was kid, they always used to tell me to keep notebooks. I look at my shelves now and it's just nothing but notebooks. And if I haven't gotten an idea but I have time to work, I'll pull one out and I bet there will be five or six sentences that will kick me off. — John Darnielle

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. — John Darnielle

What's scary is the unknown, the stuff you can't put your finger on. — John Darnielle

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

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

Every place on earth has a frequency. It's not good or bad, it's just the way it is, and if you can attune yourself to that frequency, then you can find comfort in that. — 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

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

It's an important moment as a reader, I think, when you can forget the question of whether you need to know what happened. Some people really want hard explanations. I'm the other way. I like mysteries. I don't want to frustrate people. I don't want people to feel like they got no answers, but I want to approach the mystery and sit with it. — John Darnielle

There are real teachers out there; I don't pretend to have their mantle. — John Darnielle

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

I know it's a cliché to say I write for myself, but I write for myself. — 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

North Carolina was on the vanguard of being for [ trans rights ], and that's why we're seeing this push back. The conservatives noticed that there had been a lot of progress and they tried to tamp it down. — John Darnielle

The possibility of disaster remains horrific to me. Like when you know everything's about to go wrong in a way that's not controllable or knowable. — John Darnielle

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

I always want to try and see what the appeal is in anything. It's the healthiest and most honest approach. — 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

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

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

I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren't any good and I kinda knew it. — John Darnielle

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. — John Darnielle

I suspect by the time the Beatles were writing the White Album, they didn't go, "'I Wanna Hold Your Hand!' I wanna play that!" It's like if somebody asked you to put on the clothes you wore in high school. Well, no. No! — John Darnielle

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

Life Lessons by John Darnielle

1. John Darnielle's work demonstrates the power of storytelling and its ability to connect people and bring comfort.
2. His music is a reminder that vulnerability and openness can be a source of strength and resilience.
3. His lyrics also show that it is possible to create something meaningful and beautiful out of pain and suffering.