Tom Verlaine

“What's really fun is to write under different names.”

“When somebody turned me on to a Coltrane record around seventh grade, I took up saxophone.”

“I don't see us as a big media gimmick band. We don't have a cultivated appearance or anything like Kiss.”

“I grew up taking piano lessons and liking Wagner when I was in second grade.”

“It's like first grade where you make all your mistakes and people see it and yet some people see that there's something there that's really valuable. That's the way it went for more than 2 years almost 3 years of playing.”

“Emily Dickinson has great sound and sense.”

“The first time I met Patti Smith was in a laundromat. We knew some of the same people, including Richard Hell.”

“I never liked mellow sounding guitar.”

“I think almost every woman artist I've ever met has this ideal of being in a partnership working situation with a man, that men don't seem to share. They seem to want this ideal thing, that we'll always be together and work together.”

“The song Venus de Milo, the whole subject of it is Love is a drug.”

“All the Frank O'Hara types seem to have very little sound stuff going... it's so chatty or something.”

“I really don't have that much interest in stardom.”

“I always hated jazz guitar. I loved jazz saxophone but I hated jazz guitar. If I would buy an organ trio record I would make sure I'd buy one that did not have a guitar player on it. The sound was awful!”

“You have to have that organizational principle behind the song.”

“I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.”

“I like thinking of myself as invisible. I find it a very advantageous way to live. Unfortunately, its not the way the music business works. If you don't create some kind of public image, it gets created for you.”

“I just don't like people coming up to me and saying something. It immediately makes you become insincere. There is no way you can react to it sincerely.”