John Darnielle Quotes

For me, you say the words 'concept record,' and the first thing I think of is theater or the opera or something.

For me, few things are more compelling than watching a great opera.

But theater, because of its nature, both text, images, multimedia effects, has a wider base of communication with an audience. That's why I call it the most social of the various art forms.

The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.

I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.

I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.

It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.

Opera is the original marriage of words and music, and there's a theatre element, a dramatic element. It's right up my alley.

Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical.

What interested me was dance - the way that it was constructed with time-space constructions, and that it was abstract. I always thought: 'Why couldn't theater be that way? Or an opera?'

I want to write theater pieces, opera, or some kind of amalgamation where there is singing, music and theater.

Opera is a very stimulating place to work, and I believe it offers the most intense theatrical experience possible.

A musical is really one of the most complicated beasts. It's a play, and there's music... and there's dancing... it's unbelievably satisfying to get something up out of your brain onto a piece of paper ... and start the process and then see it on the stage.

Even Shakespeare gives you a scene off.

I've always loved drama. This is a blessing because I can show a little bit of what I can do, and hopefully more, in the future.

I love being part of a group who tells stories, whether it be in the theater or in cinema, and I love creating imaginary worlds rather as children do, but I never had a burning desire to act, but it just sort of suited me.

Take my verses too serious ya hate me, cause I'm the one to paint a vivid picture, no HD.

Whenever I go to an opera, I leave my sense and reason at the door with my half-guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and my ears.

I think that both musicals and opera have a capacity to get to an inner emotional landscape.

I love being backstage, or doing littler things like Blame Canada.

You know, you should start to be in plays and things like that. Write some scripts. If you're an artist and you truly don't believe what you're spittin' then you need to really seriously be an actor then.

For me, the only type of guilty pleasure fun that I have in terms of my career is I act once in awhile. And I don't have any responsibility.

Acting is like sex: you either do it and don't talk about it, or you talk about it and don't do it. That's why I'm always suspicious of people who talk too much about either.

I absolutely love being on stage. I live and breathe the stage, and nothing makes me happier, but to perform.

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.