Top 35 Tom Verlaine Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Practice? I never practice. I just write songs and take solos.”

— Tom Verlaine

2. “I’m not a clown but I’m not an academic either.”

— Tom Verlaine

3. “I like thinking of myself as invisible. I find it a very advantageous way to live.”

— Tom Verlaine

4. “You can’t get so interested in just making sounds. The point of it all is some kind of expression.”

— Tom Verlaine

5. “In Old English they don’t say I had a dream, but there’s another usage of the word – “life is but a dream,” to be corny about it. It’s implied with eyes wide open, rather than asleep. But I’m not a philosopher to explain myself. I wish I could. Maybe that’s why I’m a musician.”

— Tom Verlaine

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

— Tom Verlaine

7. “Well, I worked in a sheet metal factory once and scarred my wrist from the cuts. I found a sympathetic psychiatrist who told the draft board I was insane. We used the scars as proof of a suicide attempt.”

— Tom Verlaine

8. “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.”

— Tom Verlaine

9. “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.”

— Tom Verlaine

10. “I don’t think Marquee Moon was so good, y’know? Just another record. First records everybody likes a lot.”

— Tom Verlaine

11. “Emily Dickinson has great sound and sense.”

— Tom Verlaine

12. “I don’t want any production credit. I think producers are overrated. They’re for people who, first of all, don’t know anything about music or arranging and have no ear for their own doings. They can’t tell a good solo from a bad solo, stuff like that.”

— Tom Verlaine

13. “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!”

— Tom Verlaine

14. “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.”

— Tom Verlaine

15. “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.”

— Tom Verlaine

16. “Places like Belgium and the south of France, Sweden and Copenhagen are really alive. They really love rock ‘n’ roll, they really respond.”

— Tom Verlaine

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

— Tom Verlaine

18. “The Beat thing happened when I was younger. I used to run away from home, inspired by the Beats, like in ’64 and ’65.”

— Tom Verlaine

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

— Tom Verlaine

20. “I always thought I was commercial. I always thought I was writing hit singles. These days, whatever’s on the radio is considered commercial. People like what’s on the radio, whatever it is.”

— Tom Verlaine

21. “I don’t think anybody thinks about their past much, unless they’re in a mental institution.”

— Tom Verlaine

22. “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.”

— Tom Verlaine

23. “Style to me is incidental. The British are very adept at creating it for its own sake, but the best style is incidental. John Coltrane had a style but it was totally incidental to what he was.”

— Tom Verlaine

24. “I’d never assume an audience was anything but totally receptive and perfect. Seriously, it seems to me that’s the only circumstance you can work under. Otherwise, speaking for myself, you may as well be in the advertising business.”

— Tom Verlaine

25. “With my records, it’s just a matter of trying to create something fresh for myself in a very finite context, which is the pop song. I don’t know anything about the people who buy my records, and what, if anything, they get out of them.”

— Tom Verlaine

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

— Tom Verlaine

27. “I’m not even sure who my audience is.”

— Tom Verlaine

28. “My non-career. My excuse for a career? Honestly, I never think about the word ‘career.’ I’ve had managers, the minute they say it to me, they look at me and just roll their eyes.”

— Tom Verlaine

29. “Everybody’s out trying to be commercial. I’m not trying to be anything, really.”

— Tom Verlaine

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

— Tom Verlaine

31. “What’s really fun is to write under different names.”

— Tom Verlaine

32. “I never liked mellow sounding guitar.”

— Tom Verlaine

33. “I really don’t have that much interest in stardom.”

— Tom Verlaine

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

— Tom Verlaine

35. “You know, there is something I’m looking for when I’m writing. But I couldn’t tell you what that is.”

— Tom Verlaine