John Darnielle Quotes

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.

My identity started developing through the songs I was writing.

The roles I think about and can't stop thinking about - on the subway, when I'm riding my bike, when I'm running - are the things I connect to.

I wanted to write and then I saw Pierrot and I understand that I could express myself in a more... Also probably, I had an intuition that if I was going to only write, I will stay in one room all the time and never go out. I felt that if I was going to make movies, I would have to communicate with people and it would be good for me.

When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.

In our own, theatre can be the place where we come together, reaching with and through stories, to who we are and to who we can be.

I write to express my thoughts, my feelings. I want people to think.

I've spent most of my life writing and developing everything that I've wanted to be in - which is why I started writing in the first place.

Anything that's really made an impact on my life, I want to get in the studio and write about it.

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

Part of the act of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don't look for them in the wrong places.

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.

Writing is the greatest thing that can happen to a human being. It's the best.

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do - the actual act of writing - turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

I write the books that I'm compelled to and I definitely learn things about the world when I write them, and I hope that other people get something out of them, enjoy them, see the world differently when they're done.

I'm learning more about life when I'm playing too, and writing music. I'm learning more about life, the connection.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

I never intended to write poems, nor to be a photographer, nor to be a film-maker. I just took many, many pictures and I would put them in an album, and then some years later I decided to show them and suddenly I was called a photographer. Same thing with my poetry. They're notes that I'd written in a book and it may be considered poetry.

You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it

Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.