“Life is entirely unthinkable without any of the creative arts, and the...” — John Darnielle Quote

“Life is entirely unthinkable without any of the creative arts, and they're all a continuum - the force in question is creativity, not its mode of expression.”

“Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself.”

“Metal has its own code of cool, but it's not really trying to be cool. And that was very refreshing to me, that metal is very much about expressing something that seems awesome to you even if, at the time, much of the world was going to mock and reject it.”

“I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.”

“I try not to write songs in which men glamorize their own need for approval from women. That's kinda a bogus way to go out. But I try to do this quietly. I'm not about to go around telling people how they should or shouldn't think. My feminism is for me.”

“I've written a lot about southern California, but I don't use the same characters. Leave the people in the songs in the songs, is my philosophy.”

“I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.”

“I truly believe that writing is a continuum - so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better. I don't write essays as often as I should.”

“Since time is a continuum, the moment is always different, so the music is always different.”

“Art is a continuum.”

“The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.”

“As far as we're concerned, we're always Sonic Youth, and we're always making a Sonic Youth record. We just see it so much more as a continuum than a periodic thing. We're just in the studio making the next record, and we don't relate it to anything other than what's going on at the moment.”