Jim Jarmusch: America is a very venal place; everything has to be sold...

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.

Jim Jarmusch

music dream inspirational

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

Jim Jarmusch

visionaries poetry thinking

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?

Jim Jarmusch

gun men thinking

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

Jim Jarmusch

details events life-is

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

Jim Jarmusch

one-way far-away way

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

Jim Jarmusch

funny-motivational goals-dreams baseball

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

Jim Jarmusch

molecules spinning shifting

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.

Jim Jarmusch

plot character thinking

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

Jim Jarmusch

stealing-things inspiration imagination

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."

Jim Jarmusch

female facts negative

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?

Jim Jarmusch

reading beautiful moving

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

Jim Jarmusch

mainstream veins hitting

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.

Jim Jarmusch

ocean artist lying

Now in the States if you look at the TV, you see the advertisements, the TV programmes, the pop videos, and the movies, they're all the same style. I think it's very condescending to the audience to assume they only have a three second attention span and so they don't leave anything on the screen for any longer. I don't understand that.

Jim Jarmusch

video style thinking

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

Jim Jarmusch

bodies-of-water film-music soul

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

Jim Jarmusch

vision language way

The Limits Of Control is not surrealism, but it is an experiment in which expectations are deliberately removed: expectations for narrative form, for action in a film, for certain emotional content. We wanted to remove those things and see if we could still make a film that was a beautiful film experience, with deliberately removing things many people would expect.

Jim Jarmusch

emotional beautiful people

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.

Jim Jarmusch

independent queens mean

One of our favorite Joe Strummer quotes was, "No input, no output." Meaning, we're going to hear a band, we're going to go to a museum, or we're going to go hang out with some writer that we admire. We're going to get some input, because if we don't, then we have nothing. It's a circle. It's a respiratory thing.

Jim Jarmusch

hanging-out admire

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

Jim Jarmusch

bodies-of-water film-music soul

America is a very venal place; everything has to be sold there. You can repackage your own s**t and sell it if it is marketed in the right way. The motivation is to sell. It's so illogical and strange to me. It's such a disposable culture and yet I feel comfortable being American.