Tom Verlaine Quotes

I try to think of the songs as little movies. They're always pretty visual to me. I can always sort of see them. I don't always know what the end result is going to be, and I don't know exactly what it's going to sound like, but I can kinda see them.

It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

As much as I love performing, nothing juices me up creatively like being in my own studio for an extended period. Songs, ideas, even paintings are pouring out of me. My inspiration and usual subject matter: life.

I do a lot of research, I try to think about how it relates to music and I just do a ton of drawing. It's much easier to work your ideas out that way.

I like the idea that people get engaged thinking about design, about creativity. I don't see how it could possibly be bad.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.

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

It's fun as a creator to make something that allows multiple interpretations.

That's the buzz for me, the creative process. An idea is never as good as when it's in your head. And then it's just how little you ruin it.

What I do enjoy is the creative process.

It's fun to try and picture what exactly is in your head and translate it onto the screen. How you can take something that lives in my mind and bring it to life - but that part is fun.

If I have a talent, it lies in the creative process.

I'm not a writer myself, so I'm forced to try to get what's a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that's a... I don't have a recipe for that process. I don't know what it is... it's different every time.

I like to be in locations that I kind of feel are very creative, that stimulate me in a creative process.

You're not gonna write a hundred songs and have a hundred entirely different ideas. It's a matter of finding the ones that are the freshest and most unique.

My work always comes from the same source - from movement. It doesn't necessarily come from an outside idea, though the source can be something small or large that I've seen, often birds or other animals. The seeing can then provoke the imagining.

Making a movie really frees up the way you think.

It's so difficult to actually come up with ideas that you really fall in love with, you know? That's the most difficult thing about filmmaking - and that's my main challenge in life.

When I make a film, I don't watch a lot of other films. I read a lot; I try to read poems, things that can liberate my human condition, that make me go away... I spend a lot of the time doing nothing, just concentrating on the subject. Sometimes I'll sit in my chair for two or three hours without doing anything.

It's important to have an imagination.