John Darnielle Quotes - Page 2

[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!

It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.

I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.

A novel is a performance you have to plan.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The South actually has a very strong tradition of activism. The civil rights movement came from down here! It was black activists demanding that their voices be heard. People say these are red states. No they're not!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

As important as politics are to me, the life and the spirit of people's emotions are much more important. People live real lives where they love and grieve and feel pain and joy and that is a whole separate sphere. All that political stuff, I believe in it strongly, but not as strongly as I believe that at some point you or someone is going to need a song to sit with and comfort them in a hard time.

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.

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

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.