John Darnielle Quotes

Literature is the question minus the answer.

I would really hate it if I could call up Kafka or Hemingway or Salinger and any question I could throw at them they would have an answer. That's the magic when you read or hear something wonderful - there's no one that has all the answers.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

That's the thing with 'Lost': you can put a spin on so many things.

Movies work, in my opinion, on the best level when they're more enigmatic, when we don't say it's this or that and where it raises more questions than answers.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

The enduring appeal of mystery stories for all of us is that the world is a pretty confusing place. There's a lot of really unanswered things, and perhaps the scariest notion would be that there might not always be answers out there for us.

I do like to wrap things up and leave some things to the readers' imagination.

Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don't deny anything, I don't advocate anything, I just live with it.

Characters can be mysterious and you're not really sure which way they might turn at a given point.

Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it's almost a journey into faith and doubt at once.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

It's a phenomenon that we don't really understand.

Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

I don't think you want to give all the answers, but I think every answer you do give should bring up another question, and not all questions should be answered.

I'm of the opinion that life doesn't always tie up neatly at the end of the episode.

The scientist should treasure the riddles he can't solve, not explain them away at the outset.

One mysterious person looking at another mysterious person equals what? Another mystery.

I think there are certain questions that get asked in comics over and over again, and people want definitive answers, but I feel like there shouldn't be definitive answers.

To me, what is important in the theater is that we don't want to make a conclusion. We don't want to make a statement, don't want to say what something is. We want to ask, 'What is it?'

It is unwise to wish everything explained.