John Darnielle Quotes

I don't think you can cry if the script is rubbish. I have to feel it; it's as simple as that. It's just like if you're watching something moving, and you feel yourself welling up. It's the same thing. You're just being carried along with the story. There's nothing magical about it. I think I'm in touch with my emotions, and I can't help it.

I think plot is very overrated. Plot is obviously necessary, but what I really care about is emotionally affecting the audience. Having a thought myself and then an emotional experience myself, somehow transferring that to the audience.

I had tears coming out of my eyes. And it was the characters that got me there.

A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it.

People will not lend you a hand until you first touch their hearts.

You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood

The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.

By making the place and the people and the feelings real, by the time someone closes the cover of one of my books, they have, hopefully, felt all of the emotions of life.

Songs have some kind of structure that connects with people's hearts.

The proof of a thing's being right is that it has power over the heart; that it excites us, wins us, or helps us.

I don't tend to work directly from life, except in trying to mimic or match the outlines of its insanity. In other words, when I live through something, I just try to say to myself, "OK, remember this - life is really this crazy or scary or beautiful or surprising - so try to 'get at' that in your stories.

But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.

For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.

I want people to be able to relate to the music, to enjoy the music, in a sense of it being fun and interesting and maybe kind of quirky. I want people to be impacted by the story.

Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.

When I go back to any of the mini-series or series that I've done, the heart and soul of the show always centers around how the people that we love are affected by our decisions.

The more real things get, the more like myths they become. There have always been myths, but the myths of earlier times were, Im convinced, bad ones, because they made people sick. So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.

Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world.

Thats beautiful! Sad and beautiful," murmured Meggie. Why were sad stories often so beautiful? It was different in real life.

Acting is acting, as far as I'm concerned and, you know, how you manifest it is, at the end of the day, not the point. It's how it affects the story & how it affects the audience. And if people are hungry to be told stories, using, using this form then there's a reason for that.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

As a director, you try to do things that are going to touch the human experience somehow, and emotions that mean something to people. You search for those projects and you hope to realize the potential in a project.

It goes without saying that all of the people, living, dead, and otherwise, in this story are fictional or used in a fictional context. Only the gods are real.

You want people to think. You want people to be emotionally moved. And there's a theory behind that in terms of storytelling. It has been around for thousands of years. And that's where something like live theater or a live performance is something that is very valuable because you get instant feedback from your audience and you kind of know the things that work and the things that don't work.

I've never cared about how successful or how big I was going to be. I just wanted to be part of a story that affected people, made them laugh or cry. To me, that was more important than having my face on some billboard.