TOM VERLAINE

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

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

I never liked mellow sounding guitar.

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

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.

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.

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

I really don't have that much interest in stardom.

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.

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

What's really fun is to write under different names.

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.

You have to have that organizational principle behind the song.

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!

All the Frank O'Hara types seem to have very little sound stuff going... it's so chatty or something.

Emily Dickinson has great sound and sense.

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

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

People ask me this a lot, what a song's about.... I do think analyzing a song can be interesting, although it doesn't necessarily get to the point. It's a whole other side activity. I do like making a thing into pictures. If I get an abstract idea and all the words in it don't represent tangible things, I might try to take the idea and make it into a picture, create a little scene there, an image.

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

When I think of 'influence', I think of 'influenza', like somebody's picked up a germ.

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.

I can't remember ever being really bored. I find life very interesting, actually. I think some other musicians are always looking for something to give them an idea, but I find I have to reject 90 percent of my ideas because they don't live up to some self-imposed standard. That's also why I don't make a record once a year. I throw so many things out, and I have to have something to say.

I can't presume to speak for the others, but I never felt anything negative from anyone when I was onstage with Television. When I played rhythm behind Lloyd, the only thing that concerned me was to push him as hard as I could so that he'd go beyond what he was capable of and come up with something new, and vice versa. That's the only thing that mattered.

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.