Tom Waits Quotes

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Tom Waits

Profession : Musician

Birth : December 7, 1949

The piano has been drinking, not me.

Tom Waits

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

Tom Waits

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

Tom Waits

Somebody said I sound like an old lady, and I was really insulted by that. I'm trying to sound like Skip James and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye.

Tom Waits

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.

Tom Waits

I used to imagine that making it in music - really making it in music - is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture.

Tom Waits

Oh, I got a beautiful 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille four-door. No one will ride in it with me.

Tom Waits

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.

Tom Waits

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.

Tom Waits

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

I have an audio stigmatism whereby I hear things wrong - I have audio illusions.

Tom Waits

I think I have an adrenaline addiction, no question about that.

Tom Waits

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

Tom Waits

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

Tom Waits

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

It's hard to win when you always lose.

Tom Waits

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

Tom Waits

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

Tom Waits

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

Tom Waits

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.

Tom Waits