John Darnielle Quotes

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.

Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musician's curse.

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

Sadly I don't sing. I missed it for a long time, but my daughter Emma said something wonderful when I was feeling blue one day: "Mom, you've just found a different way of using your voice, and that's with your books." In a way, she's right. It's just a different way of expressing what I feel about music, individuality, art and all the things I've always loved.

I never buy a piece of art. I don't see the point in buying something because I know my eyes will get bored of it eventually.

Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.

The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.

This superficial blurring has something to do with the incapacity I have just mentioned. I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever. But this doesn't explain the pictures. At best it explains what led to their being painted.

Art will liberate itself from the needs and desires of men. No longer will we paint a forest ora horseas we like oras theyappear to us, but as they really are.

Art is a form of consciousness.

It depends little on the object, much on the mood, in art.

Art has got nothing to do with taste.

I'm certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed

There is a field where all wonderful perfections of microscope and telescope fail, all exquisite niceties of weights and measures, as well as that which is behind them, the keen and driving power of the mind. No facts however indubitably detected, no effort of reason however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.

Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.