John Darnielle Quotes

I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I'm enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.

Naturally, people's image is of a performer, but the reality of it is the writing for me has always been the most important thing and the most rewarding thing.

But, that was the beginning, though I didn't start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.

When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

I never stopped writing music, I just stopped writing songs. I've been writing music continually ever since the last album of original tunes, "River Of Dreams" in '93.

Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.

Once an interesting idea or theme occurs to me then I would want to write a poem about it. The rest, frankly, is not difficult.

Poetry is a process of getting back to the unconscious. Hence, I am always writing-even when I'm not facing the white space. I feel writers are like reservoirs of images. We take in what is around us.

I was 12 or 13 years old. So I started to write poetry and fiction, even though I was really into biology because my dad was a science teacher. I kept writing all those years.

Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.

I've always felt that the poems I've written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let's write about that. In every case what has happened is that I've become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn't shake it.

From when I was a kid I wanted to write. It was so important to me that I was writing my own material.

I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore

Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.

I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.

I am writing these poems from inside a lion.

One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done.

I stopped writing at the age of 18. I had written incessantly before that. I read, of course, because I was in university, but I wasn't going to write. I wasn't going to do any of those dangerous things. I was going to be a stolid, bourgeois lawyer.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

The writing of You've Got a Friend was one of the most incredible experiences because it was mostly inspiration. It just came to me almost as we hear it.