Jim Jarmusch Quotations

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

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.

Hopefully, if not it's not working right. 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.

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

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.

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 start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities. It's always a real collaboration for me.

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

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

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.

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

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.

I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.

I like to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting.

The intention was to shoot short films that can exist as shorts independently, but when I put them all together, there are things that echo through them like the dialogue repeats; the situation is always the same, the way they're shot is very simple and the same.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I wanted to make an Indian character who wasn't either a) the savage that must be eliminated, the force of nature that's blocking the way for industrial progress, or b) the noble innocent that knows all and is another cliche. I wanted him to be a complicated human being.

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've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there.

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

It was a really interesting time in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn't have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things.

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

Wayne, New Jersey, ... And shooting in it was very depressing. Because everyone has the same stuff, you know? The same TV, the same cars, their kids dress the same. But then the people in the community were really, really nice to us. Very enthusiastic and kinda lovely. But before that human connection, it was just depressing to me, to be in that kind of hermetically sealed community. I think a lot of people actually live in places like that, more and more.

What I did was I completed the half-hour film, but before really showing it, I wrote two more sections for a potential feature film which I didn't think would really happen, but at least I had it in case.

So if too many people like my films, I might get scared and think I did something wrong. Honestly.

obviously these characters come out of my head, but they have to embody them, so Jeffrey certainly lifted it above what I imagined but also came through with what the film really needed from that character.

I didn't go to classes there, but ended up at the Cinematheque, and there it opened up even wider because there I saw a variety of films from all over the world.

It came from an idea that some friends of mine gave me years ago,

is a kind of sad film -- it has a lot of funny stuff in it -- but I don't think of it as a comedy. ... The humor isn't a result of gags or big jokes, but small behavioral things people do.

Yeah, ... Maybe people like us will live there in the future, when they're all overgrown and rundown. And there's, like, coyotes walking through.

I negotiate my deals with a loaded shotgun. They were not on the set of the film.

I like doing them and they're ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don't have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They're really fun, I want to make more of them definitely.

I hope not, ... God, I hope not.

He's a master of that minimal thing, ... Which is kind of odd for someone initially known for painting in broad comedic strokes. And then to see him work with a tiny, fine, one-haired brush like that, you know? He's really pretty amazing. He can go either way, as far as you want him to.

Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?

I am interested in the non-dramatic moments in life. I`m not at all attracted to making films that are about drama. A few years back, I saw a biopic about a famous American abstract expressionist artist. And you know what? It really horrified me.

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.

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

It's a sad and beautiful world.

A lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

For me, the music is always like the small rowboat I get into at the very beginning of my process.

No mistakes can be make during rehearsals, only progress toward what works best.

Stupid f***ing white man.

Consequently, I get inspiration from all over the place. But it's not like a calculated thing on my part, or a way that I see myself. I'm just interested in things that move me, and I don't care where they come from. In fact, I'm interested if they come from a place I wouldn't expect, or would seem foreign to me on some level.

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

I thought The Limits of Control could be interpreted in two ways: as the limits of one's self-control; and as the limits of allowing other people's control over one's -consciousness - which I kind of thought was a double meaning that was appropriate.

When I'm trying to imagine something, I have a few elements, a few ideas, maybe a certain actor or actress I want to create a certain type of character for, or maybe a certain place.

Separate two particles, place them at opposite ends of the universe, produce some effect in one, and the other will be identically affected.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Ghost Dog: 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 prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural. I'm not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream.

It's hard to get lost if you don't know where you're going.

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.

Music, to me, is the most beautiful form, and I love film because film is very related to music. It moves by you in its own rhythm. It's not like reading a book or looking at a painting. It gives you its own time frame, like music, so they are very connected for me. But music to me is the biggest inspiration. 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?

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.

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

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

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?

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.

The Huns cross Europe, raping and pillaging, ... You know? That's only half a line, so that must take 12 seconds.