John Darnielle Quotes

Wrestling is to go out there and perform and make people believe that either of the performers in the ring can win - either the bad guy or the good guy.

To portray something that you're really not, it's like a little escape, and I love to act and to be dramatic. I feel like the wrestling ring in WWE is the perfect platform to do that. It's totally acceptable.

This isn't a competitive sport. Wrestling is not the NFL or the NHL. It's not really sports. It's entertainment. And in order to be entertaining, you have to create emotion. And you can't create emotion by simply having a wrestling match.

Johnny Valentine's the one who said, 'I can't make them believe that wrestling is real, but I can make them believe I'm real.' It would take him forever because he was just stinkingly boring for 30 minutes of the 40-minute match, but he would let people hit him as hard as they could, and he would hit people as hard as he could.

I play a character in the WWE and everybody hates my character. I'm the evil villain bad guy. Whenever people meet me, they're like, 'Wow, you're such a nice guy. We never expected that.'

I think I'm sort of method in a sense, and I enjoy, you know, trying to find that reality in fake emotion.

People ask me how I am such a good heel, but I don't know; I just try to be me and go and do what I need to do to get the job done on any show that I am on and achieve the work that is set up in front of me.

I might be the only guy in WWE who isn't acting ever.

As WWE Superstars, we want to have confidence and stand strong in the ring.

I love wrestling, and I love telling a story to the audience.

In comic books, every character exists in this comic book world, and the wrestlers were the same thing. They were responsible for creating that world and putting it out there - having the confidence to go forward and do that and behave in a certain way.

I've always liked being on the performance end of it. I've come up with different ideas, but as far as being a creative writer, I'm not sure about that. I've always liked the performance end of it and wrestling, getting in the ring in front of a live crowd.

I am me. I've always been a character, and my character's story lives into pro wrestling.

Obviously, wrestling is a lot of fun, and I love it. But on the mic is where I have the most fun.

I really think that some of the best heels are also those people that can really get reactions as babyfaces, too.

You're always trying to find common ground with whatever you do, but you want to not be thinking about yourself when you're performing a play. The job is getting yourself out of the way and letting the character go about the scenes.

I literally view wrestling as the time when I was playing with action figures. You can make anything out of it. You can make it be fun.

The key is to be a personality outside of the ring and then bring that personality with you inside the ring.

The roles I'm interested in or have been interested in, you know, it's going to get down to conflict. Drama is conflict - conflict of interests.

It's your job as an actor to fill out the blanks. I love doing that. To fill in the bones.

Characters don't belong to anyone, not even the person who plays them.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

Yeah, I think the common denominator - and this is probably going to sound like Acting 101 - but the common denominator is belief in the character in the moment.

Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I'm paid to tell elaborate lies.

I like to play very raw characters, characters who have a degree of vulnerability and passion about what they're doing.