Quotes from Tom Verlaine

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

Boogie! I hate boogie, God, I mean, not the Chicago boogie like Willie Dixon or Howlin' Wolf, but all those awful white bands.

You have to have that organizational principle behind the song.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Places like Belgium and the south of France, Sweden and Copenhagen are really alive. They really love rock 'n' roll, they really respond.

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.

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

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!

I never liked mellow sounding guitar.

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

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

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

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

I told somebody in Europe I was 43. I never tell my true age. It's ridiculous that people ask. The press doesn't deserve anything but lies.

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.