John Darnielle Quotes

I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.

The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story, when you read a book, in a way that is unique and special to each person who reads it.

The funny thing about writing is, although you are writing about an experience which only you have had, you are trying to welcome other people into it, and there are ways I think of doing this, and one of them is through the senses, through the sounds and the smells.

For a child, reading a book can be such an intense experience.

Books allow you to see the world through the eyes of others.

I'm a storyteller; that's what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven't been and returning to tell a story they haven't heard before.

The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.

I'm interested in stories. I think I'm a bit of a pathfinder.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

What I like about writing a stand alone novel is you're starting with a fresh world and fresh characters. Part of what I love about writing is that journey of discovery where it's all new to me as well.

Every kid has a story to tell!

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

One of the fantastic things about books, fiction or non-fiction, is the way they give you a chance to look into different lives.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.

I'd like to read a book sometime. I've never read a book before. That'd be an adventure. I understand they have pages and everything. Yeah, I've got to do that sometime.

Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me.

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.

For me, an ideal novel is a dialogue between writer and reader, both a collaborative experience and an intimate exchange of emotions and ideas. The reader just might be the most powerful tool in a writer's arsenal.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

Anyway, stories bring us together to find common ground, to find our way through life together, or just to entertain us, and I am just thrilled to be a part of that process.

The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people.