“Your creativity before it gets formed into words and songs is the actu...” — John Darnielle Quote

Your creativity before it gets formed into words and songs is the actual substance. No one else can see it, right? Unless you give it the shape of a song or a painting or whatever.

You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that's what walking through New York on a June evening feels like - you feel like it's Friday, and you're 17 years old.

Younger songwriters will ask me, 'What did you do?' And it's like, 'Well, I worked a day job, and I didn't stake anything. I didn't quit my day job. I didn't have any hopes at all. I just did the thing that I believed in, and I waited a long time.'

I love Joan Didion, but I love her writing. I don't think meeting her could solve my problems or make me understand the world better.

We do not believe that the Marxist program, which embodies the continuity of the experience of the actual class struggle and real revolutions of the last one hundred and fifty years, is a definitely closed book.

If people are going to watch TV, let's give them something coherent with actual dialogue.

There's something attractive about making people temporarily forget their actual age by taking them out of their normal lives so completely. Doesn't travel, by its very nature, strive to do this?

I think some of the best music throughout the actual history of music itself came from cultures where they're not really looking for outside themes. It's developed from their hometowns - it's what they love and what they love to do.