Tom Waits Quotes

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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.

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

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

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.

But then 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.

Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting.

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.

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.

Don't look back, because someone might be gaining on you.

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.

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.

You know what I really love? The CD players in a car. How when you put the CD right up by the slot, it actually takes it out of your hand, like it's hungry. It pulls it in, and you feel like it wants more silver discs.

I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I'm an amateur physician, I guess.

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.

Any place is good for eavesdropping, if you know how to eavesdrop.

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.

I saw a crow building a nest, I was watching him very carefully, I was kind of stalking him and he was aware of it. And you know what they do when they become aware of someone stalking them when they build a nest, which is a very vulnerable place to be? They build a decoy nest. It's just for you.

If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.

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. You find that out really fast.

When I was younger, I wanted to be older. Now I am older, I am not quite so sure.

Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.

The piano has been drinking, not me.

The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.

I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.

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.

I'm so horny the crack of dawn better watch out.

It's hard to win when you always lose.

I'm just trying to make a buck like everyone else.

George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.

Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.

I hate Disneyland. It primes our kids for Las Vegas.

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable.

The sight of the first woman in the minimal two-piece was as explosive as the detonation of the atomic bomb by the U.S. at Bikini Island in the Marshall Isles, hence the naming of the bikini.

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

George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.

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.

I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have.

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