John Darnielle Quotes

I don't ever remember being able to debate with my parents. Even though I thought of myself as a very bright kid, I couldn't be vocal in that way.

Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.

Not that we didn't have close relationships with our parents - I'm very close to my mom - but parents didn't think anything of going off for a few weeks and leaving their kids.

No, like I said, my dad was never really part of the tennis. His involvement around what I did with the tennis and with my mom and my grandparents was really not a part of my life.

There's a moment in time where kids really don't want to hear anything from their parents.

I firmly believe, however, that if your children have never hated you, you have failed as a parent.

Kids never get pissed at their parents. Unheard of.

A lot of the moms of autistic kids I met are so consumed with being their child's advocate that there's no room for anything else - least of all themselves. It's why so many marriages end in divorce, when a child is diagnosed on the spectrum.

Have you ever noticed how parents can go from the most wonderful people in the world to totally embarrassing in three seconds?

To me, the main difference between young people now and the people I was young with isn't so much style, it's the relationships they have with their parents. Their parents like them much more than ours liked us. Our parents weren't our friends. But now I see my friends on the phones with their, what, 30 - year - old kids? And they're talking about feelings.

You’re always a kid around your parents… Unless they’re acting like children. Then you don’t get the chance.

He scarcely saw his parents. When Christopher was small, he was terrified that he would meet Papa out walking in the Park one day and not recognize him.

My childhood was lonely. Both my parents were away a lot, working, and the maid basically raised me. And I think that's where a lot of my comedy comes from. Not only was the maid very funny and witty, but when my mother came home I'd use humour to try and get her attention. If I made mommy laugh, then maybe everything would be all right. I think that's where it [my comedy] all started.

There's a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of divorced families. I come from a divorced family... and you have parents meet someone and they have kids and you're with that whole having to meet new people and be your family. That's always a hard thing to do.

Right from the start my parents had left me to fend for myself. Apparently unaware that I was a kid, they invariably treated me like an adult, perhaps because they themselves were no spring chickens.

I don't know if I came to this life with it or if it's something that came to me in my childhood, but I do feel that some of the things my parents said to me and how they raised me really stuck with me.

That's one of the surprises in the research, that's it's not young people who are smitten with their phones. It's their parents who are not paying attention to them.

When I was 3 years old, my parents got a dog. I was jealous of the dog, so they got rid of me.

I can't stand films that make the kids out to be heroes and the parents to be imbeciles.

A new survey found that 12 percent of parents punish their kids by banning social networking sites. The other 88 percent punish their kids by joining social networking sites.

I'm not thinking about forcing my kids to watch my movies. It's always awkward when someone says: "Hey, I wrote a song, can I play it for you?" That would be the dynamic, if I was like: "Hey, you're my son, watch my work!" I don't want to put them in that awkward position. Just because when they get older, that's when I'm worried, that they'll judge me and say: "Yeah, my father's ******* Jack Black. He was in that cheesy movie." So, I'm going to keep it all high quality. It'll be a quality controller.

The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.

Young people realize that something is amiss. There's a generation that fell in love with their phones, and it's very hard for them to see that there's a problem. But young people are desperate for the attention of their parents, who are really not paying attention to them.

I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.

I was the youngest kid. When I was five, my sisters were 17, 19, and 21, already becoming women. I would see how different they would be around one another and around men, even my father.