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Tom Waits Quotes | Quotes said by Tom Waits

  • Tom Waits Quote #1

    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 Quote #2

    And I remember quiet evenings trembling close to you...

  • Tom Waits Quote #3

    As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time.

  • Tom Waits Quote #4

    Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don't care if they lose it; they'll just make another one.

  • Tom Waits Quote #5

    He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, What happened to your hand? And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

  • Tom Waits Quote #6

    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 Quote #7

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

  • Tom Waits Quote #8

    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 Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

    I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

  • Tom Waits Quote #11

    I made a wish on a sliver of moonlight
    A sly grin and a bowl full of stars

  • Tom Waits Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    I’ve always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used… I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around… this is an interesting one, it’s amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something.

  • Tom Waits Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.

  • Tom Waits Quote #16

    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 Quote #17

    Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.

  • Tom Waits Quote #18

    Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

  • Tom Waits Quote #19

    My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else? they asked me the other day.

    I told them this story:
    In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you. And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest. So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.

  • Tom Waits Quote #20

    My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

  • Tom Waits Quote #21

    Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.

  • Tom Waits Quote #22

    The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.

  • Tom Waits Quote #23

    The Universe is making music all the time.

  • Tom Waits Quote #24

    The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

  • Tom Waits Quote #25

    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 Quote #26

    There ain't no devil, only God when he's drunk.

  • Tom Waits Quote #27

    There ain't no such thing as the devil that's just god when he's drunk.

  • Tom Waits Quote #28

    We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.

  • Tom Waits Quote #29

    Well, it's either kiss me or kill me, that's how I see it.

  • Tom Waits Quote #30

    When the weather's rough and it's whiskey in the rain it's best to wrap your savior up in cellophane.

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