There are stylists I really love. I'm a huge Joan Didion fan - if I wrote something that she might like, then I'd feel very proud. I want the action to move as quickly as it does in A Book of Common Prayer, where one thing bonks right into another very quickly.

John Darnielle

Life is hard, you're tired, and there's disease. The strategy that works for children is to be delighted by the things that delight you.

John Darnielle

life-is-hard tired children

I have a hunger for justice, but art is a place I've always enjoyed being able to be free - to live in worlds that you don't have to be thinking about that all the time. I don't see myself writing Upton Sinclair books. My books are to entertain, although to me, entertainment is to make you feel sadness or to get in touch with your own pain - or fear, or to remember somebody who has gone missing from your life. That's my calling.

John Darnielle

pain book art

You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.

John Darnielle

dream character thinking

When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.

John Darnielle

jaded my-friends feelings

People talk about songwriting or comedy as creative expression, but life is creative expression. Table-making, even nursing, is extraordinarily creative.

John Darnielle

nursing expression people

There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.

John Darnielle

dies stories two

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

John Darnielle

extra-help wind thinking

Every place on earth has a frequency. It's not good or bad, it's just the way it is, and if you can attune yourself to that frequency, then you can find comfort in that.

John Darnielle

earth comfort way

I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.

John Darnielle

hermits devices kind

Anything that is within you is a gift. To be able to take possession of that and say, "Whatever it is, I am bigger than it," is to learn to cherish even the hard and painful things.

John Darnielle

cherish able painful

You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.

John Darnielle

shelter giving world

A novel is a performance you have to plan.

John Darnielle

plans novel performances

I am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am.

John Darnielle

surroundings caves i-can

The moment where you know the thing you want is ridiculous and pompous and a terrible thing to want anyway. The direction in which you're headed is not the direction you want to go, yet you're going to head that way a while longer cause that's just the kind of person you are.

John Darnielle

causes want way

I consider myself a lyricist first and foremost, but if you get something else out of what I do, that's fine too. I'm not sitting back here telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it.

John Darnielle

sitting play people

Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.

John Darnielle

reality way

It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.

John Darnielle

referencing projects different

A bands first albums usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.

John Darnielle

serious trying jobs

Young people like to feel self-righteous, like they're on the right side of things.

John Darnielle

self sides people

The South actually has a very strong tradition of activism. The civil rights movement came from down here! It was black activists demanding that their voices be heard. People say these are red states. No they're not!

John Darnielle

voice strong rights