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. 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 of the most important reasons for living is to do something - live outside of yourself and put together an idea, an idea that you want to explore and then complete... Awaken your creative sensitivities!

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That's why I keep making them.

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.

To some extent, I'm mildly surprised by every new piece, by the precise path that my interest takes.

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

I've been adjusting to what it means to be a songwriter, figuring out what I like about it and what I don't like about it and what it means to me as opposed to other people.

When I look into the audience, and I just know we understand each other, I can see their faces, and they know what I'm talking about. I feel like I've helped. Everything I've been through in my life, it helps people. Then that makes it worth it.

As someone whose music is connected to his personal growth, I feel an obligation to follow this muse wherever it leads.

I feel like, for me as an artist, it takes me a while of living with the tracks and living with the body of work to realize what it's all about.

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.

I appreciate all of the unexpected places, internal and external, that my writing has taken me.

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.

How many of you are creative? I don't know, but for me, when you make a bunch of things over time and then you keep them... you forget. I look through my sketchbooks and I'm an audience for myself.

Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in what he creates.

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.

You don’t need help to write a song. You just need to get over this experience that bummed you out so bad. The relationship you were in is over, it was over a long time ago, and you need to move on.

What makes me put pen to paper? You know, that's the million-dollar question. I've been writing since I've been reading. It's not a question I think that's even meant to be answered, but it's something you always seek to discover the answer to. And the process of filmmaking is one of discovery, and self-discovery at that. Pleasure... it's not exactly what I would call fun, but it's absorbing.

While there is no quick fix for instant, pain-free creativity, creative recovery (or discovery) is a teachable, trackable spiritual process. Each of us is complex and highly individual, yet there are common recognizable denominators to the creative recovery process.

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