Tom Waits Quotes

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Tom Waits

Profession : Musician

Birth : December 7, 1949

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

If people are a little nervous about approaching you at the market, it's good. I'm not Chuckles The Clown. Or Bozo. I don't cut the ribbon at the opening of markets. I don't stand next to the mayor. Hit your baseball into my yard, and you'll never see it again.

Tom Waits

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

Tom Waits

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

The only thing worse than being in the Hall of Fame is not being in the Hall of Fame.

Tom Waits

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

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

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

Tom Waits

The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.

Tom Waits

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

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

Tom Waits

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

Tom Waits

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

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.

Tom Waits

I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.

Tom Waits

I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music.

Tom Waits

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

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

Tom Waits

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

George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.

Tom Waits