Tom Verlaine Quotes

Any new ideas go into PiL. My inspiration is everything that the human being gets up to. I don't listen to any music when I'm in PiL-zone, because influences can poison your well. Otherwise, I listen to anything.

My goal is to think of nothing when I'm writing a song because too many influences could sabotage a potentially amazing song.

I would worry if I wasn't coming up with ideas, if I wasn't inspired.

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

I used to worry that I had a finite supply of ideas, that I should hold on to each of them in case it was the last. But then I talked to other cartoonists, and I realized ideas are cheap; you can have a million ideas. The tricky part is the follow-through: making good ones work, making the best out of the raw material!

I always got ideas.

Geniuses don't have better ideas than the rest of us. They just have more of them.

You think you've made something really great, but there's a reason why it's not resonating the way some previous work did. But it's not that easy to just replicate. Some people think, "Oh, just go do that thing you used to do before." But it just doesn't work like that. It's a lot more mysterious or slippery.

I can't really say - if I've run out of ideas until I've had my next set of ideas.

Boredom is useful to me when I notice it and think: Oh I'm bored; there must be something else I want to be doing... boredom acts as an initiator of originality by pushing me into new activities or new thoughts.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

What you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought.It is an awfully lonesome business, and, as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all, I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.

Creativity allows people to be effective.

I don't really know where the songs are coming from often. Many of the best things I made up were just off the top of my head.

Each time I sit down and write a play I try to dismiss from my mind as much as I possibly can the implications of what I've done before, what I'm going to do, what other people think about my work, the failure or success of the previous play. I'm stuck with a new reality that I've got to create.

Speed is absolutely key to creativity. The more time it takes to create something, the less likely you are to create something.

I'm not nervous if I think about something for nine years and then I don't write it. Even if it fades it doesn't concern me. It'll come back if it's worth it.

I've no idea where ideas come from and I hope I never find out; it would spoil the excitement for me if it turned out I just have a funny little wrinkle on the surface of my brain which makes me think about invisible train platforms.

Genius may be for an hour or a thousand years; its indispensable quality is continuity with the life-push.

I think it's a big part of being a creative person.

I feel like I have a lot of novel ideas, but they often come up while I'm already in the process of working on a book. You have to watch out with the slutty new idea.

[Mannerism is when] you think you have all these great ideas, and none of them are good at the end of the day. But while you are pursuing those other things subconsciously happen.

Men of genius are like eagles, they live on what they kill, while men of talents are like crows, they live on what has been killed for them.

I've been thinking so much about writing as a gift to readers - and how newness of subject (place or topic or person) is one of the biggest gifts at our disposal.