Quotes from John Darnielle

It's impossible to be content all the time - you have to learn to be content in places where you're unhappy and owning your emotions, whatever they are.

Anger is preverbal, so, by the time you're using words to express an angry feeling, you're already imposing loads of structure on that primal experience.

For me, moving is always a big opportunity. Its just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.

I think I am a religious person just by nature. I think I sort of view everything through the lens of some inner undying thing in people that drives them to act as they do or to feel ashamed of not acting in some other way.

People do all sorts of things impulsively and follow those impulses into strange places.

Wrestlers give their bodies to their work. I don't know if I like the word 'crazy' here. What I would say is there are people who have a different relationship to their bodies than most people.

It's like fiction - the fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing - but it's happening in real space.

Wrestling's a form of expression, and it expresses vastness.

I think the self is complicated, that at various times we are all various people, and wrestling actually does a lot with that. You have things like heel turns where a person goes from being a good guy to a bad guy.

The more established you are, the less likely you are to do something ridiculous, which is one reason I'm proud to put out a wrestling album. If you stop and you go, 'Well, what if people don't like it?,' if you're already established in what you do, that'll strike fear into your heart.

One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.

I think wrestling is the one that presents theater for people who want to see some theater but don't necessarily have to dress up or be quiet while they're watching.

Wrestling is like any form of drama or pretty much any form of entertainment - some people understand this about forms of entertainment really intuitively when they're younger, and others would have to be really not very intelligent for a long time until we realize that every human mood is an art.

Once you start talking to people, you find out there's a lot more wrestling fans than you think there are.

The best ones - Hulk Hogan believes in Hulkamania. It's not a thing he's selling here. It's real. He knows it's real because he goes to the Mall Of America and everybody goes insane, right? Wrestling is real. Those characters are real.

I think, taking too long to work on a record, you sort of lose some of the feeling, so I write as fast as I can; it's just this manic phase where I'm by myself and or on tour, and I write, and I write.

Touring is just not normal for me. My personality is to never ever talk to people if I can help it.

To me, the only good reason to be touring is if you still have something good to share instead of just revisiting past glories.

People like to say how much they like stuff, but with 'The Sunset Tree, ' people shared stories about what it meant for them. And that stuff's so humbling and amazing.

I think The Sunset Tree is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.

I hang out and sign records for an hour or two hours every night, and I like to hear as many people's stories as I can, because if somebody wants to share their story with me, I want to honor that.

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.

Most of 'All Hail West Texas' was written during orientation at a new job I had. I had basically worked this job before, I knew this stuff, so I was writing lyrics in the margins of all the Xeroxed material.

I wrote 'Lakeside View Apartment Suites' with Roman in my arms. He was about a month old. I was playing left-handed and finally handed him over. On the demo of it, you can hear him crying in the next room.