Jim Jarmusch Quotes

A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.

I didn't get my degree at NYU; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

When I get depressed, or anything, I go 'think of all the music I haven't even heard yet!' So, it's the one thing. Imagine the world without music. Man, just hand me a gun, will you?

If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.

It's hard to get lost if you don't know where you're going.

The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events.

Each one of us is a set of shifting molecules, spinning in ecstasy.

The counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product. It's part of America.

I prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural. I'm not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream.

I'm like a navigator and I try to encourage our collaboration and find the best way that will produce fruit. I like fruit. I like cherries, I like bananas.

Jim Jarmusch: Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

Select only things to steal that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent

No mistakes can be make during rehearsals, only progress toward what works best.

Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.

When I left Ohio when I was 17 and ended up in New York and realised that not all films had the giant crab monsters in them, it really opened up a lot of things for me.

If you have a counterculture band, you put a name on it, you call them beatniks, and you can sell something - books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts.

I don't like American football. I think it's boring and ridiculous and predictable. But baseball is very beautiful. It's played on a diamond.

It's a sad and beautiful world.

Good acting is about reacting, not tryingto express something, but reacting to a situation as the character.I don't like acting acting.

In the words of the ancients, one should make his decision within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break through to the other side.

Separate two particles, place them at opposite ends of the universe, produce some effect in one, and the other will be identically affected.

I didn't get the degree because in my last year, for my thesis film I made a feature called Permanent Vacation and they'd given me a scholarship, the Louis B Mayer fellowship and they made a mistake.

I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.

I consider myself a feminist, in a way.

A lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?

Baseball is one of the most beautiful games. It is. It is a very Zen-like game.

Making a film that is in seven days of one week is not a new idea.

Specific music starts feeding my imagination and gives me a landscape that corresponds somehow, in some abstract way, to the world I'm just starting to imagine.

I have a real respect for tobacco as a substance, and it just seems very funny how the Western attitude is, "Wow, people are addicted to this, think of all the money you can make off it."

I've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there.

Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.

When I'm trying to imagine something, I have a few elements, a few ideas, maybe a certain actor or actress I want to create a certain type of character for, or maybe a certain place.

The New York School poets are my godfathers creatively.

A cult classic... both a celebration of the unlimited potential of the comic book form, and a perfect melding of inspiring, iconoclastic imaginations.

[Kenneth Koch] taught us to be playful, to be very appreciative of other poets, to appreciate all forms of expression. He taught us to be experimental.

I think you can only be nostalgic for something you've lost.

The beauty of a movie is that you walk in, you don't know anything about it, you enter a world that's new to you, and that's the magic of being transported.

Stupid f***ing white man.

I like repetition, but I really, really like variations, synchronistic things that happen where you're not really thinking about them.

For me, the music is always like the small rowboat I get into at the very beginning of my process.

Just write a poem as if you're writing a note to one other person.

I started working with friends of mine and that, to some degree, continues.

I love silent films. The future is unwritten.

My films are about the little things that happen between people that are sometimes far more valuable and insightful than the big dramatic things that happen.

America was built on an attempted genocide, anyway. Guns were completely necessary.

[Iggi Pop] is very self-taught, self-educated, but, man, that guy knows about so many things.

I love John Ashbery. He's the - really the poet laureate of English language poetry, whether he's given that or not, he is to me.

I'm completely intuitive and I don't like to analyze things.