Tom Waits Quotes

The piano has been drinking, not me.

Well you say that it's gospel, But I know that it's only church.

They say that I have no hits and that I'm difficult to work with. And they say that like it's a bad thing.

Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead

Got 27 children I never see.

Well, I hope that I don't fall in love with you
Cause falling in love just makes me blue
Well, the music plays and you display your heart for me to see
I had a beer and now I hear you calling out for me
And I hope that I don't fall in love with you

Well, the room is crowded, people everywhere
And I wonder, should I offer you a chair?
Well, if you sit down with this old clown, I'll take that frown and break it
Before the evening's gone away, I think that we can make it
And I hope that I don't fall in love with you

Well, the night does funny things inside a man
These old tomcat feelings you don't understand
Well, I turn around to look at you, you light a cigarette
I wish I had the guts to bum one, but we've never met
And I hope that I don't fall in love with you

I can see that you are lonesome just like me
And it being late, you'd like some company
Well, I turn around to look at you, and you look back at me
The guy you're with he's up and split, the chair next to you is free
And I hope that you don't fall in love with me

Now it's closing time, the music's fading out
Last call for drinks, I'll have another stout
Well, I turn around to look at you, you're nowhere to be found
I search the place for your lost face, guess I'll have another round
And I think that I just fell in love with you

Cross my wooden leg, swear on my glass eye.

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

I like vocal word stuff. But I don't always write with an instrument, I usually write a capella. It's more like drawing in the air with your fingers. It's closest to the choreography of a bee. You're freer.

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

There's no prayer like desire.

The beginning of it starts at the end

hell is boiling over. And heaven is full. We're chained to the world. And we all gotta pull. And we're all gonna be ...just dirt in the ground".

It was a hubba, hubba, ding dang, baby you are just everythang.

I was always eh, kinda want to like consider myself kind of a pioneer of the palette, a restaurateur if you will. I've wined, dined, sipped and supped in some of the most demonstrably beamer epitomable bistros in the Los Angles metropolitan region. Yeah, I've had strange looking patty melts at Norms. I've had dangerous veal cutlets at the Copper Penny. Well what you get is a breaded salsbury steak in a shake-n-bake and topped with a provocative sauce of Velveeta and uh, half-n-half. Smothered with Campbell's tomato soup. See I have kinda of a uh ... well I order my veal cutlet, Christ it left the plate and it walked down to the end of the counter. Waitress, ? she's wearing those rhinestone glasses with the little pearl thing clipped on the sweater. My veal cutlet come down, tried to beat the shit out of my cup of coffee. Coffee just wasn't strong enough to defend itself.

I know a girl, she been married so many times, she got rice marks all over her face

I put food on the table
and roof overhead.
But I'd trade it all tomorrow
for the highway instead.

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.

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.

I don't like listening to records a lot after they're done. There's just no real nourishment there for me.

If you get far enough away you'll be on your way back home.

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.

the earth is not my home, I'm just passing by

There's a certain fast-food approach to the whole music thing that's changed the role it plays for us all. You are doing it while you are doing other things. Not that that is new - people have had music on in the background as long as there has been music.

I don't like hearing Beatles songs in commercials. It almost renders them useless. I think, 'Oh God, another one bites the dust.'

She's got the whole dark forest living inside of her.

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

The dog won't bite if you beat Him with a bone

I didn't really identify with the music of my own generation, but I was very curious about the music of others.

I've made a profound transformation. I've fashioned some cyber-underwear. I'm not scared of anything! Actually, I am scared of a few things. Cyber world is a world of adventure, a new galaxy. I'm big on adventure. But I don't assume that just because the word cyber is being used as a prefix, doesn't give it anymore value or credence. Cyber relationships have the illusion of intimacy, sometimes with the absence of intimacy. Is it better to have a conversation in a café or on the telephone?

I'm not fighting for justice. I am not fighting for freedom. I am fighting for my life and another day in the world here.

Everything you can think of is true.

You got to tell me the brave captain
Why are the wicked so strong?
How do the angels get to sleep
When the devil leaves the porch light on?

If I want a sound, I usually feel better if I've chased it and killed it, skinned it and cooked it. Most things you can get with a button nowadays. So if I was trying for a certain drum sound, my engineer would say: "Oh, for Christ's sake, why are we wasting our time? Let's just hit this little cup with a stick here, sample something (take a drum sound from another record) and make it bigger in the mix, don't worry about it." I'd say, "No, I would rather go in the bathroom and hit the door with a piece of two-by-four very hard.

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.

Fishin' for a good time starts with throwin' in your line.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall ... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

I was born in the back seat of a Yellow Cab in a hospital loading zone and with the meter still running. I emerged needing a shave and shouted 'Time Square, and step on it!'

All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes

You know, we just buy music now. We don't make it any more. And that goes for just about everything. I think it's so important that people develop and subscribe to and have confidence in their own ability to make music, however rough it is.

Disneyland is Vegas for children.

All medical procedures require two hands, so in a sense it's like when you play an instrument. That's what they call things that they use in their work: They call them instruments. A lot of people start out majoring in medicine and drop it and change their major to music.

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

You learn as much from your kids as they learn from you.

Every single song has its own individual character and you can't treat each song the same way, because it wants to be treated differently and there are songs that are like scared birds that you have to sneak up on over the course of months in the woods.

Not the kind of wheel you fall asleep at.

Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning.

I hope I'm becoming more eccentric. More room in the brain.

Singing is just doing interesting things to the air. Elongating it and twisting it into shapes.

Oh, I'm not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.

Jimmy Stewart said he stopped making movies because he didn't like the way he looked on screen anymore. I'm more the guy who says I look like hell but I'm going to see where it gets me.

Got a head full of lightning, a hat full of rain.

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

Oh I don't mind going to weddings, just as long as it's not my own ...

I always thought songs are movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.

There's a place down the street; Seven Xs. What does that mean? Maybe it's ... girls without skin.

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

Planes and Trains and Boats and Busses Characteristically Evolve a common attitude of blue Unless you have a suitcase and a ticket and a passport And the cargo that they're carrying is you.

Time is just memory
Mixed in with Desire.

I was always laughing in church.

I think some bands thrive on the idea of changing instruments. When they're off their real instrument, the ability to go very far from the original idea is reduced.

There's a lot of intelligence in the hands.When you pick up a shovel, the hands know what to do. The same thing's true of sitting at the piano.

A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't.

It's very hard to stop doing things you're used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.

Well you wave your hand and they scatter like crows
They have nothing that will ever capture your heart
They're just thorns without the rose
Be careful of them in the dark
Oh, if I was the one you chose to be your only one
Oh baby can't you hear me now, can't you hear me now
Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
Every night it's just the same, you leave me lonely now

I'll take a rusty nail and scratch your initials on my arm.

i never told the truth so i can never tell a lie...

There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.

Your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they've been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don't explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing. I'm learning to break those habits by playing instruments I know absolutely nothing about, like a bassoon or a waterphone.

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 used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3 A.M.

I've seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train ...

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.

Don't plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me - choke those little bad days. Choke 'em down to nothing.

Picture in a frame

Presley's what I go by, why don't you change the station.

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.

The trick is to have a career and have a family. It's like having two dogs that hate each other and you have to take them for a walk every night.

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

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.

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

(When asked for advice for younger musicians) Break windows, smoke cigars, and stay up late. Tell 'em to do that, they'll find a little pot of gold.

Some day I'm gonna be gone and people will be listening to my songs and conjuring me up. In order for that to happen, you gotta put something of yourself in it.

The ocean doesn't want me today,
But I'll come back tomorrow to play.
The riptide is waging
And the life guard's away
But the ocean doesn't want me today

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.

There ain't no devil there's just god when he's drunk

Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don't get out much. It's true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.

I just don't like the word 'fun'
it's like Volkswagen, or bell-bottoms, or patchouli-oil or bean-sprouts ... it rubs me up the wrong way.

Well, they'll bark you down like carneys, sell you Christmas cards in June.

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.

using parking meters as walking sticks.

It's cold out there, colder than a ticket taker's smile at the Ivar Theatre on a Saturday night.

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.

I do some acting. And there's a difference between "I do some acting" and "I'm an actor."

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.

My first big gig was an opening show for Frank Zappa, and I think that was difficult.

The moon was sharp enough to draw blood from a stone

I may be drunk but at least I'm not insane.

The ship is sinking The ship is sinking There's leak, there's a leak,in the boiler room The poor, the lame, the blind Who ore the ones that we kept in charge Killers, thieves, and lawyers God's Away, God's away God's away on Business

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