[Kenneth Koch] taught children in public schools in New York City to write poems and told them down worry about rhyming, don't worry about any of that stuff. You know, write a poem where you mention three colors and make it five lines - or he would just give them, you know, little strategies. And, man, they wrote some great poems.

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

Sometimes I make films about scenes other filmmakers would leave out, so I just make the film out of all the things they wouldn't put in. Poetry allows you to do this more than prose, for example.

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.

Film relates to almost every other form of expression, but poetry is a bit abstract in its strength and sometimes even the white spaces on the page are evocative almost as much as where the text is. Certain poets have played with that.

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 had this idea for a long time to make a film about a poet in Paterson named Patterson. I wanted him to be working class. Eventually I thought a bus was a perfect visual way to move him, to drift him through the city, to have a measured kind of routine lifestyle. And all these things kind of congealed into the film "Paterson" eventually.