The New York School poets are my godfathers creatively.

I like marginal characters, I like real people. I learn more from talking to my plumber when he comes to fix my toilet than I do from meeting a movie star. I think my movies are in the same vein as that.

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.

Music just gives me so much energy and inspiration. Music and literature in a way probably influence me more than cinema does because they're different forms and yet related. I probably know as much about music history as I do about the history of cinema.

Domesticity is a fact of how social structure works. So if you say, "Well being domestic as a female is a negative trait," then that would be like saying, "Having a family - because that's an economic unit designed to further the economic structures in the world - if you have a family then you're subjugated."

I always think the Sex Pistols and the Ramones as very, very important because they stripped things down.

I love variation in all forms: in painting, in music.