Jim Jarmusch Quotes

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.

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

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.

Some people would find just the rhythm of my films alone to be a nightmare; they'd probably just fall asleep because they want something quicker. Other people fall into it and it works for them like a dream.

It's a sad and beautiful world.

If you make a film, that magic is not there, because you were there while shooting it. After writing a film and shooting it and being in the editing room every day, you can never see it clearly. I think other people's perception of your film is more valid than your own, because they have that ability to see it for the first time.

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

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

Those of us who make films try to make something that we're feeling and that we would like. Then we just hope an audience responds the same way. It's very important to have the electrical circuit made, but I don't have control over how people feel when they flip the switch. So the whole idea of marketing research and test screenings is just foreign to me.

I will say it's great - that Method Man - Cliff Smith - plays a rapper in a laundromat who is working out some lyrics sort of to the rhythm of a washing machine. And something about hip-hop culture and hip-hop is the ability to use current language and slang and reference details of life is very, very strong for me.

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

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

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.

I think people should have the right to bear arms, but they should be limited as to what kinds of guns they can have.

The beauty of ideas is that they are like waves in the ocean and they connect with things that came before them, and I think it is very important to embrace things that interest you and influence you, and incorporate them into what you do, as all artists have always done. The ones that say they don’t, are lying. Or are afraid that their work won’t be seen as being original, somehow.

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.

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

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

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

As soon as you start making a film that's expensive then the studio wants total control over all elements of it because they want to get all their money back. If you make a smaller film you can try a lot more things because you can have control over it and not just be a hired director. The lower the budget the more freedom you have.

I'm not interested in stories. Stories are interesting but I don't think my head works that way. I remember at age 10 I dreamt of making animated cartoons as loops, something you could just project on your wall and look at from time to time. Kind of, something to stare at, something that's always there.

You can define everything as being political and analyze it politically.

When I hear the word independent I reach for my revolver. At this point, what the hell does that mean? The English Patient is an independent film... Hootie and the Blowfish are alternative music. I'm the Queen of Denmark. I don't know what it means anymore.

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

I'm not into killing living things, you know, but I'll always have guns.

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

I love rehearsing because in rehearsals there are no mistakes, nothing is wrong, some things apply or lead you to focus on the character and the things that don't apply are equally valuable because they lead you to towards what does.

Cricket makes no sense to me. I find it beautiful to watch and I like that they break for tea. That is very cool, but I don't understand. My friends from The Clash tried to explain it years and years ago, but I didn't understand what they were talking about.

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

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

I love riding on a bus now because you're looking down on the world from not too high of an angle, but people on the street rarely look up into the bus. They're sort of oblivious to this big giant machine, you know, passing by. So there's something very beautiful about the angle that you look at the world through.

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?

You are the accumulations of your experiences at any given point. And when you express something those things come out. The thing is I hate seeing my films when I'm done with them, so I don't look back as a chart of my life, but I leave it as a kind of chart. Though, it is a photograph, captured.

I have to tell everyone that when I finish a film and it goes out and is released, I never look at my films again. I don't like looking back. I don't even like talking about 'em! So I'm really digging back in my memory because I don't like to sit and look at my films again.

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

I'm not putting down anyone that does look at their work in that way, but for me I am a hardcore amateur.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 think of myself as an amateur filmmaker, not a professional, in the sense that "amateur" means love of something, for the form.

I visited Paterson many years ago - 20 some years ago as a kind of day trip because of William Carlos Williams, because of Allen Ginsberg having lived there. And I went to the Great Falls and sat really in the exact same spot as Adam Driver does as Paterson. And I walked around the factory buildings, and I was rereading - I was reading at the time the epic length poem "Paterson" by Williams.

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

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

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