Top 100 Tom Waits Quotes
#1. It's terrible for the culture of music. Like anything that is purely economic, it ignores the most important component.
Tom Waits
#2. You got to tell me the brave captain
Why are the wicked so strong?
How do the angels get to sleep
When the devil leaves the porch light on?
Tom Waits
#3. (When asked for advice for younger musicians) Break windows, smoke cigars, and stay up late. Tell 'em to do that, they'll find a little pot of gold.
Tom Waits
#4. I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
Tom Waits
#5. There's a place on my arm where I've written her name next to mine.
Tom Waits
#6. Somebody said I sound like an old lady, and I was really insulted by that. I'm trying to sound like Skip James and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye.
Tom Waits
#7. You want soldiers who, when they get to a river after a long march, don't start rooting for their canteen in their pack, but just dive right in.
Tom Waits
#8. I'm not one of those people the tabloids chase around.
Tom Waits
#9. If you get far enough away you'll be on your way back home.
Tom Waits
#10. When you are writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
Tom Waits
#11. Misery is the River of the World
Tom Waits
#12. Oh, I got a beautiful 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille four-door. No one will ride in it with me.
Tom Waits
#13. If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.
Tom Waits
#14. Well it's hotter 'n blazes and all the long faces / there'll be no oasis for a dry local grazier
Tom Waits
#15. I took a hundred dollars from a blindman's hand.
Tom Waits
#16. Sometimes words are just music themselves. Like 'Chicago' is a very musical sounding name.
Tom Waits
#17. It's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace, and a wound that will never heal. No prima donna, the perfume is on an old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey. Goodnight to the street sweepers, the night watchmen flame keepers and goodnight, Matilda, too.
Tom Waits
#18. Don't plant your days they turn into weeds
Tom Waits
#19. New York forces you to be in endless surreal situations.
Tom Waits
#20. The trick is to have a career and have a family. It's like having two dogs that hate each other and you have to take them for a walk every night.
Tom Waits
#21. Some day I'm gonna be gone and people will be listening to my songs and conjuring me up. In order for that to happen, you gotta put something of yourself in it.
Tom Waits
#22. And they all pretend they're Orphans
And their memory's like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can't remember
Tell the things you can't forget that
History puts a saint in every dream
Tom Waits
#23. There's always free cheddar in the mousetrap, baby.
Tom Waits
#24. I don't know if any genuine, meaningful change could ever result from a song. It's kind of like throwing peanuts at a gorilla.
Tom Waits
#25. There's nothing that makes me laugh more than being in the situation where you're not supposed to laugh. Funerals. People crying. Breaking down. Telling you their life. I'm the worst. I'm the worst at that.
Tom Waits
#26. New York, of course, is to be in endless surreal situations where a fifty-thousand dollar, gun-metal Mercedez pulls up into a puddle of blood, and out steps a twenty-five karat blonde transvestite with a two dollar wristwatch.
Tom Waits
#27. I worry about a lot of things, but I don't worry about achievements. I worry primarily about whether there are nightclubs in Heaven.
Tom Waits
#28. You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty. I don't want to live any other way.
Tom Waits
#29. If you are recording, you are recording. I don't believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal.
Tom Waits
#30. A foreign affair juxtaposed with a stateside
and domestically approved romantic fancy
is mysteriously attractive due to circumstances knowing
it will only be parlayed into a memory
Tom Waits
#31. Sing me a rainbow. Steal me a dream.
Tom Waits
#32. My first big gig was an opening show for Frank Zappa, and I think that was difficult.
Tom Waits
#33. Let me fall out of the window/
With confetti in my hair
Tom Waits
#34. The way you do anything is the way you do everything.
Tom Waits
#35. The ship is sinking The ship is sinking There's leak, there's a leak,in the boiler room The poor, the lame, the blind Who ore the ones that we kept in charge Killers, thieves, and lawyers God's Away, God's away God's away on Business
Tom Waits
#36. I danced along a colored wind/ Dangled from a rope of sand
Tom Waits
#37. Folks who work here are professors. Don't replace all the knowers with guessors keep'em open they're the ears of the town
Tom Waits
#38. A mental midget with the IQ of a fence post.
Tom Waits
#39. It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.
Tom Waits
#40. There is no such thing as nonfiction.
Tom Waits
#41. I put food on the table
and roof overhead.
But I'd trade it all tomorrow
for the highway instead.
Tom Waits
#42. If you are making a record, you are the one saying 'action', and you are the one saying 'cut,' and you have to be sure that the most interesting thing is not going on outside the frame.
Tom Waits
#43. There's no prayer like desire.
Tom Waits
#44. I didn't really identify with the music of my own generation, but I was very curious about the music of others.
Tom Waits
#45. Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On
Tom Waits
#46. My wife, when I met her, she had a remarkable record collection. And they were all still in their sleeves! I couldn't believe it. She took care of her records. Rachmaninov, Beefheart. For me, most of my records were out of their sleeves and in a drawer somewhere. I married a record collection.
Tom Waits
#47. You just write and you don't try to make sense of it. You just put it down the way you got it.
Tom Waits
#48. Anton brings the camera. I'll bring a tuba, wear black, not shave, and take us to a burned-down Chinese restaurant. (On being photographed by his longtime photo collaborator Anton Corbijn)
Tom Waits
#49. When the weather's rough and it's whiskey in the rain it's best to wrap your savior up in cellophane.
Tom Waits
#50. The piano has been drinking, not me.
Tom Waits
#51. If I exorcise my devils, all my angels may go, too.
Tom Waits
#52. I always thought songs are movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.
Tom Waits
#53. It ain't no sin, to take off your skin and dance around in your bones
Tom Waits
#54. I'm so horny the crack of dawn better watch out.
Tom Waits
#55. I'm the type of guy who'd sell you a rat's asshole for a wedding ring.
Tom Waits
#56. I've always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.
Tom Waits
#57. Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning.
Tom Waits
#58. There's only one reason why you write new songs: You get sick of the old songs. It's not that I didn't do anything during the time when I wrote no songs. I was creative, but in another way. I had ideas for songs and collected the ideas.
Tom Waits
#59. And I'm standing on the corner of Fifth and Vermouth.
Tom Waits
#60. It's hard to win when you always lose.
Tom Waits
#61. It's the same with men as with horses and dogs, nothing wants to die.
Tom Waits
#62. They called it the Terminal Bar but they had no idea that like twenty years later the place'd be filling up with terminal cases.
Tom Waits
#63. I like vocal word stuff. But I don't always write with an instrument, I usually write a capella. It's more like drawing in the air with your fingers. It's closest to the choreography of a bee. You're freer.
Tom Waits
#64. You know, we just buy music now. We don't make it any more. And that goes for just about everything. I think it's so important that people develop and subscribe to and have confidence in their own ability to make music, however rough it is.
Tom Waits
#65. On my gravestone, I want it to say, "I told you I was sick."
Tom Waits
#66. But it's so hard to dance that way when it's cold and there's no music.
Tom Waits
#67. It's very hard to stop doing things you're used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.
Tom Waits
#68. Most changes in music, most exciting things that happen in music, occur through a miscommunication between people "I thought you said this." Poetry comes out of that too.
Tom Waits
#69. There's a place down the street; Seven Xs. What does that mean? Maybe it's ... girls without skin.
Tom Waits
#70. She's got the whole dark forest living inside of her.
Tom Waits
#71. I don't like hearing Beatles songs in commercials. It almost renders them useless. I think, 'Oh God, another one bites the dust.'
Tom Waits
#72. It's new, it's improved, it's old fashioned.
Tom Waits
#74. Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don't get out much. It's true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.
Tom Waits
#75. I'm trying to get music ideas that come and keep them alive. It's like carrying water in your hands. I want to keep it all, and sometimes by the time you get to the studio you have nothing.
Tom Waits
#76. What you want is for music to love you back. That's why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it.
Tom Waits
#77. I do some acting. And there's a difference between "I do some acting" and "I'm an actor."
Tom Waits
#78. I don't know what the 'big time' is.
Tom Waits
#79. There ain't no devil, just God when he's drunk.
Tom Waits
#80. George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.
Tom Waits
#81. You can drive out nature with a pitch fork
But it always comes roaring back again.
Tom Waits
#82. I know a girl, she been married so many times, she got rice marks all over her face
Tom Waits
#83. I've been riding on the crest of a slump lately.
Tom Waits
#84. The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
Tom Waits
#85. He said, I'm better off without her, until I showed him my tattoo.
Tom Waits
#86. Most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit that remains the object of their long relentless quest. The obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending, the pursuit you see and never the arrest" - Tom Waits "Foreign Affairs
Tom Waits
#87. She pulls a razor from her boot and a thousand victims fall around her feet.
Tom Waits
#88. I walked 500 miles just to see a halo, when I opened my eyes I was blind as can be.
Tom Waits
#89. I ain't got no spare/I ain't got no jack/I don't give a shit/I'm not going back
Tom Waits
#90. Well you say that it's gospel, But I know that it's only church.
Tom Waits
#91. Oh I don't mind going to weddings, just as long as it's not my own ...
Tom Waits
#92. I bark my voice out through a closed throat, pretty much. It's more, perhaps, like a dog in some ways. It does have its limitations, but I'm learning different ways to keep it alive.
Tom Waits
#93. I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.
Tom Waits
#94. We are all just monkeys with money and guns.
Tom Waits
#95. I have a Chamberlain I bought from some surfers in Westwood many years ago. It's an early analog synthesizer; it operates on tape loops. It has 60 voices - everything from galloping horses to owls to rain to every instrument in the orchestra.
Tom Waits
#96. Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.
Tom Waits
#97. There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.
Tom Waits
#98. And the earth died screaming, while I lay dreaming ...
Tom Waits
#99. There's a beauty of show business. It's the only business you can have a career in when you're dead.
Tom Waits
#100. There's not much difference between what I appear to be on stage and what I am. I think people like that, that I'm not trying to pull a caper.
Tom Waits
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