Quotes About Tom Waits

#1. It's terrible for the culture of music. Like anything that is purely economic, it ignores the most important component.

Tom Waits

#2. Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it.

Tom Waits

#3. 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

#4. (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

#5. I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We're all looking at the wrapping. But we won't tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath.

Tom Waits

#6. I would love to work with Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, B.B. King. I'd love to do something with Arctic Monkeys, Miles Kane, and The Last Shadow Puppets. If I got a call from Juliette Lewis or PJ Harvey, or Chrissie Hynde, that'd be a thrill.

Imelda May

#7. Oh, I'm not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.

Tom Waits

#8. All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes

Tom Waits

#9. I've seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train ...

Tom Waits

#10. All my friends are dead, or else they're not feeling too good.

Tom Waits

#11. I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

Tom Waits

#12. There's a place on my arm where I've written her name next to mine.

Tom Waits

#13. Come down off the cross, we could use the wood.

Tom Waits

#14. If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back, it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.

Tom Waits

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.

Tom Waits

#18. I'm not one of those people the tabloids chase around.

Tom Waits

#19. If you get far enough away you'll be on your way back home.

Tom Waits

#20. I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

Tom Waits

#21. 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

#22. The folks who know the truth aren't talking ... The ones who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up!

Tom Waits

#23. Misery is the River of the World

Tom Waits

#24. the earth is not my home, I'm just passing by

Tom Waits

#25. I didn't really want to be part of a clique or a niche. But I also was looking for my own voice, as a writer, y'know? And a world I could call my own.

Tom Waits

#26. I did my time in the jail of your arms

Tom Waits

#27. The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.

Tom Waits

#28. I dunno, when I started writing really I was like, filling out applications and stuff real early. Last name first, first name last, sex ... occasionally, stuff like that. Then I was writing letters, filling out forms, writing on bathroom walls ...

Tom Waits

#29. I can't do that wonderful thing that Tom Waits and Bob Dylan do - to do imagery. I'm not good at that. I just write from the heart.

Rod Stewart

#30. I can't listen to so much music at the same time. I think you really have to have a diet. You're just processing too much, there's no place to put it. If you go a long time without hearing music, then you hear music that nobody else hears.

Tom Waits

#31. Oh, I got a beautiful 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille four-door. No one will ride in it with me.

Tom Waits

#32. 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

#33. I've never met anyone who made it with a chick because they owned a Tom Waits album. I've got all three, and it's never helped me.

Tom Waits

#34. When you're a kid and you're trying to find your own voice, it's rather daunting to hear somebody like Howlin' Wolf, because you know that you'll never achieve that.

Tom Waits

#35. I think I have an adrenaline addiction, no question about that.

Tom Waits

#36. Well it's hotter 'n blazes and all the long faces / there'll be no oasis for a dry local grazier

Tom Waits

#37. using parking meters as walking sticks.

Tom Waits

#38. The first time I started listening to Irish music, I had a very strong connection. Strangely enough, there's a great many Japanese melodies and vocal styles that sound very much like Hungarian music. You start seeing all these cross-references and comparative, independent musical cultures.

Tom Waits

#39. You choke my days, I'll choke yours.

Tom Waits

#40. I took a hundred dollars from a blindman's hand.

Tom Waits

#41. Sometimes words are just music themselves. Like 'Chicago' is a very musical sounding name.

Tom Waits

#42. 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

#43. Tony Black is the Tom Waits of Crime Fiction, yes, that good.

Ken Bruen

#44. All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.

Tom Waits

#45. Any image I have, it's just what I do, but it comes off as being very pretentious. When you're a bit in the public astigmatism, anything you do seems like you did it so somebody would see you do it, like showing up at the right parties.

Tom Waits

#46. Don't plant your days they turn into weeds

Tom Waits

#47. I'll take a rusty nail and scratch your initials on my arm.

Tom Waits

#48. You know when you throw a party, you think people will show up and no one will like each other. It's like that with music - parts of your musical psyche have never met other parts. You wonder if you should get them together.

Tom Waits

#49. New York forces you to be in endless surreal situations.

Tom Waits

#50. 'I don't want to grow up', Tom Waits said it. I live it. I put myself in a position to be a kid as long as I want to. I play loud music and scream for a living.

Jason Newsted

#51. I can count on one hand the people who are legendary in my book, and Tom Waits is certainly right at the top. It's funny, though: When I tell people that I like Tom's music, it surprises them.

Steve Vai

#52. 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

#53. Leonard Cohen can give you "Leonard Cohen" - the self-deprecating wit, the slow, considered speech, the perfectly-honed anecdote - Tom Waits is far more comfortable giving a journalist "Tom Waits" the character, whose conversation is really a series of strange tales, learned or ad-libbed.

Sylvie Simmons

#54. I guess my favorite artists are The White Stripes or Tom Waits. The more theatrical the music is, the more I get into it. I also like the quieter folk music, that kind of old-school rockabilly or country. I'm not really picky when it comes to music, as long as it's honest.

Landon Liboiron

#55. I have a piano in my kitchen. I read a great biography about Tom Waits that said that he had a piano in his kitchen; he had a grand piano in his kitchen. And I thought, 'Well, if Tom Waits has one, then I must.'

Jamie Cullum

#56. The dog won't bite if you beat Him with a bone

Tom Waits

#57. People get frightened that success is going to take them out of life. They're no longer going to be on the corner of Bedlam and Squalor; life will only be something you can get through the mail.

Tom Waits

#58. 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

#59. Jimmy Stewart said he stopped making movies because he didn't like the way he looked on screen anymore. I'm more the guy who says I look like hell but I'm going to see where it gets me.

Tom Waits

#60. For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

Tom Waits

#61. 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

#62. Songs are pretty easy. They are small, they are modular, they are about as big as a bagel. They are easy to build. Films are overwhelming in their magnitude and scope. By comparison, a lot of film directors wish they were writing songs because you can do it while getting your hair cut.

Tom Waits

#63. I like writing melody without an instrument. It's just so - it's more like the choreography of a bee; you just go.

Tom Waits

#64. There's always free cheddar in the mousetrap, baby.

Tom Waits

#65. You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops.

Tom Waits

#66. I always wanted to sound like a man, like Jeff Buckley or Tom Waits.

Florence Welch

#67. What I look for in music is artistry, sincerity, and simplicity, and Tom Waits has all of that. I want to make a connection to the creator.

Steve Vai

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. Popular music is like a big party, and it's a thrill sneaking in rather than being invited. Every once in a while, a guy with his shirt on inside out, wearing lipstick and a pillbox hat gets a chance to speak.

Tom Waits

#71. I just don't like the word 'fun'
it's like Volkswagen, or bell-bottoms, or patchouli-oil or bean-sprouts ... it rubs me up the wrong way.

Tom Waits

#72. 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

#73. Misery's the river of the world. Everybody row!

Tom Waits

#74. I can't write story-songs, like I couldn't write a Bob Dylan or Tom Waits song. I can only write whatever weird phrases come into my head, and hope that they're good.

Jay Watson

#75. 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

#76. I'm interested in things when I don't know what they are. Like "Hey, Ray, what the hell is this?" Oh, that's lipstick from the 1700s, that's dog food from the turn of the century, that's a hat from World War II. I'm interested in the minutiae of things. Oddities.

Tom Waits

#77. What else don't women like besides the Three Stooges? Tom Waits. Being hurt physically or emotionally.

Julie Klausner

#78. And when they pulled her from the wreck, you know, she still had on her shades

Tom Waits

#79. Most songs that aren't jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs.

Tom Waits

#80. Arithmetic arithmetock
Turn the hands back on the clock
How does the ocean rock the boat?
How did the razor find my throat?
The only strings that hold me here
Are tangled up around the pier.

Tom Waits

#81. There's a certain fast-food approach to the whole music thing that's changed the role it plays for us all. You are doing it while you are doing other things. Not that that is new - people have had music on in the background as long as there has been music.

Tom Waits

#82. hell is boiling over. And heaven is full. We're chained to the world. And we all gotta pull. And we're all gonna be ...just dirt in the ground".

Tom Waits

#83. Singing is just doing interesting things to the air. Elongating it and twisting it into shapes.

Tom Waits

#84. People tend to believe that I want to make soul music, which is not entirely untrue but, really, I want to be like the black Tom Waits - I don't want to make one kind of sound.

Willis Earl Beal

#85. Bringing up children was]like living with a bunch of drunks ... you really have to be on your toes all the time.

Tom Waits

#86. All medical procedures require two hands, so in a sense it's like when you play an instrument. That's what they call things that they use in their work: They call them instruments. A lot of people start out majoring in medicine and drop it and change their major to music.

Tom Waits

#87. With families and music, you're usually looking for something that can make you unique.

Tom Waits

#88. I don't like the stigma that comes with being called a poet ... So I call what I'm doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue.

Tom Waits

#89. Not the kind of wheel you fall asleep at.

Tom Waits

#90. I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.

Tom Waits

#91. 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

#92. I love Tom [Waits] for the same reason I love Leonard Cohen, which is that they are both one-offs, templates; they both seemed old, or at least dressed old when they were young; both kind of lived their careers backwards.

Sylvie Simmons

#93. People make songs so that somebody else will hear them and want to do them. I guess it's an indication that the songs aren't so ultra-personal that they can't possibly be interpreted by anyone else.

Tom Waits

#94. 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

#95. Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead

Tom Waits

#96. I'm reliable sources, I'll tell ya anything you want me to know.

Tom Waits

#97. I had a great conversation with Tom Waits, of all people.

Oscar Isaac

#98. I'm always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you're drowning, and it's there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.

Tom Waits

#99. A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't.

Tom Waits

#100. The beginning of it starts at the end

Tom Waits