Tom Verlaine Quotes

We've all had our thing. I listened to the Monkees when I was little kid.

When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I was completely nuts about Buddy Holly. And I loved pop bands that had absolutely no intellectual pretensions whatsoever. I loved the Monkees.

I remember seeing Stand by Me, when I was around 12, and just feeling like, "This is so refreshing to see kids swear and smoke cigarettes like my friends." It just felt much more real than the Sesame Street version of childhood that I'd been spoon-fed.

I'm waiting for my kids to grow up and get into the Offspring and look at me like I'm a total candy-ass.

I love the Beatles. I haven't named any kids after them but I still really love them. They were the first group that I was ever properly aware of. In my early teens I would sometimes stay in and listen to the radio all day in the hope that I would catch a song by them that I'd never heard before and be able to tape it on my radio-cassette player.

What's society going to be like when the kids today are phenomenally good at text messaging and spend a huge amount of on-screen time, but have never gone bowling together?

I wanna hear some Diana Ross, I wanna hear some Marvin Gaye. I wanna hear a song that reminds me of a better day.

Usually the kids are portrayed as very one-dimensional. Like these mindless animals that just have three things on their minds: getting laid, getting drunk, and driving real fast over Mulholland Drive.

I wasn't a kid when I came out. Soulja Boy was 16. I'm saying that when he came out he was a kid so it was naturally a show for him. It's not about the music right away. It's a show for him. Not that he's not putting enough effort into his music, but how much effort can a 16 year old put into his music because as you mature and get older even the songs he's doing now has evolved and he's looking back.

A lot of kids bought guitars and started playing rock'n'roll because of us.

I wanted to get a guitar [when I was 13] so I could play punk songs because kid taught me power chords at summer camp. He was like, "You could play all punk songs if you just learn this chord and just move it around on the guitar".

To me, the punk rock kids I grew up with were really, really smart, and to me, respecting those kids was a really big deal.

I like that cartoons are now not only animated drawings, they are a way of doing something: 'That song sounds very cartoony', or 'He has a cartoon face'. Like the word 'poetic', which usually means something different than a poem. But most of all cartoons are comforting, that's the real reason I need them.

Young people can listen to music at any moment in the day or night. Which is great, but I think it kind of devalues it as well. They don't feel the need to own it. They certainly don't feel the need to pay for it. I'd have to save up for weeks to buy an album when I was a kid, and that made it even more great for me when I finally got that thing in my hand.

I'm not a grown up until everybody realises I'm a grown up. When everyone remembers me as the dirty kid singing little songs I am the dirty little kid.

I see kids today trying to do the things I did, and it makes me feel like I've come a long way.

People are part of my music. A lot of my songs are the result of emotional experiences, sadness, pain, joy, and exultation in nature and sunshine and so on...like 'California Girls' which was a hymn to youth.

Surfing music is dead. It was just a summer craze for kids on the beach. I'm finished with it.

When we had gone down there you have to remember KISS had never been to Australia. So all the hysteria of KISS that was happening in the seventies was building up in Australia. These kids were waiting seven years to see KISS. I was lucky enough to be there when we went over. We got the key to the city, it was just great.

The fact that we represented freedom, you know. We talked about that in the songs and I think that the parents, like all parents, they want their kids to be in line and not go crazy or do anything too weird (laughs). And for some reason, I think, people identified The Doors as representing just being able to do whatever you wanted to do.

I was about 17 or 18 and there were a lot of clubs and dancing. It was the beginning of rave culture and a lot of ecstasy. Because of all the drugs, there are certain songs that make me feel high.

The thing that pleases me the most about it is that young people like it. It's given kids from 6 to 16 an alternate view of music to what's been available for the past 20 years.

there is this one photograph... that is just beautiful. it would be impossible to describe how beautiful it is, but i’ll try. if you listen to the song “asleep,” and you think about those pretty weather days that make you remember things, and you think about the prettiest eyes you’ve known, and you cry and the person holds you back, then i think you will see the photograph.

The first song I ever learned to sing and play on the piano was 'I Remember Sky' when I was 10 years old. I remember thinking, This is the most beautiful song I will ever hear. And that remains true for me to this day. His music is the sole reason I wanted to be on Broadway. I wanted to sing music that transports us to the most important place one can travel, our hearts.

The whole dating ritual was different when I was a kid. Girls got pinned, not nailed.