John Darnielle Quotes

Good things never last, bad things never die.

I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work and it creates this strange connection. It's really a way of strangers communicating through this third thing, which is a body of work. But really, I know it's a cliché to say I write for myself, but I write for myself.

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

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

It's good to be young, but let's not kid ourselves/ It's better to pass on through those years and come out the other side/ With our hearts still beating/ Having stared down demons/ Come back breathing.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

[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.

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.