Tom Waits Song Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I always thought songs are movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.

Tom Waits

#3. [Courage] arises in a great measure from the consciousness of strength ...

Edward Gibbon

#4. To the audience it doesn't really matter how much the director struggled with an actor. It's the result that counts.

Roman Polanski

#5. There's a complete difference between training for a specific event and goal and just training.

Michael Johnson

#6. Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you're mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.

Tom Waits

#7. It was not surprising that after the war Dostoevsky was linked to Kierkegaard as a prophet of social resignation.

Martin Jay

#8. Every single song has its own individual character and you can't treat each song the same way, because it wants to be treated differently and there are songs that are like scared birds that you have to sneak up on over the course of months in the woods.

Tom Waits

#9. 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

#10. Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing
with the air.

Tom Waits

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Sometimes the magnetism of a song is impossible to ignore, and it demands that it be sung in a certain way.

Tom Waits

#14. 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

#15. I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.

Tom Waits

#16. It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

Tom Waits

#17. There are many sources of happiness. Doing goodness is one of them and one of the best!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#18. Let me fall out of the window/
With confetti in my hair

Tom Waits

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. And things go unsaid soon get forgotten

Malorie Blackman

#23. There are a lot of people who pretend to have moral ethics and they talk from both sides of their mouth.

John Assaraf