Words matter. These are the best Tom Waits Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I’m an amateur physician, I guess.
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.
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.
My first big gig was an opening show for Frank Zappa, and I think that was difficult.
I’m usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page. Some people write for the page, and that’s a whole other thing. I’m going for what it sounds like right away, so it may not even look good on the page.
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.
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.
Oh, I got a beautiful 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille four-door. No one will ride in it with me.
You hope people are going to be listening to you after you’re gone. And they like you better after you’re gone.
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.
Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting.
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.
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 first big gig was an opening show for Frank Zappa, and I think that was difficult.
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.
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.
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.
The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.
My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.
I hate Disneyland. It primes our kids for Las Vegas.
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.
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.
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.
When you’re 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.
I don’t like listening to records a lot after they’re done. There’s just no real nourishment there for me.
I have an audio stigmatism whereby I hear things wrong – I have audio illusions.
I’m just trying to make a buck like everyone else.
Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.
I used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3 A.M.
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.
Sometimes words are just music themselves. Like ‘Chicago’ is a very musical sounding name.
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.
