Tom Waits quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Tom Waits

Tom Waits Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Tom Waits on Wise Famous Quotes.

You want soldiers who, when they get to a river after a long march, don't start rooting for their canteen in their pack, but just dive right in.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

When your down on your luck and you've lost all your dreams theres nothing like a campfire and a can of beans

I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.

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

All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes

The devil knows the Bible like the back of his hand.

It's a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.

It's hard to win when you always lose.

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

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

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

The things you absorb you will ultimately secrete. It's all out there and available for you to enjoy ... and be nourished by.

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

You choke my days, I'll choke yours.

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

Bill Hicks - blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer, and brain specialist. He will correct your vision. Others will drive on the road he built.

I like writing melody without an instrument. It's just so - it's more like the choreography of a bee; you just go.

There's a place on my arm where I've written her name next to mine.

When the weather's rough and it's whiskey in the rain it's best to wrap your savior up in cellophane.

Jesus Christ, this godamn rain, will someone put me on a train.

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

It's terrible for the culture of music. Like anything that is purely economic, it ignores the most important component.

Bringing up children was]like living with a bunch of drunks ... you really have to be on your toes all the time.

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

Misery is the River of the World

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

An all time favorite: The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.

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".

You're innocent when you dream.

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

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?

Picture in a frame

And the earth died screaming, while I lay dreaming ...

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

The moon was sharp enough to draw blood from a stone

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

(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.

You have to keep busy. After all, no dog's ever pissed on a moving car.

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

I'm the type of guy who'd sell you a rat's asshole for a wedding ring.

The Music was like Electric Sugar

I ain't got no spare/I ain't got no jack/I don't give a shit/I'm not going back

You hope people are going to be listening to you after you're gone. And they like you better after you're gone.

I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing
with the air.

There is no such thing as nonfiction.

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

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

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

You must have brought the bad weather with you
The sky's the color of lead
All you've left me is a feather
On an unmade bed

Now it's closing time/the music's fading out.

Sing me a rainbow. Steal me a dream.

Let me fall out of the window/
With confetti in my hair

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

You just write and you don't try to make sense of it. You just put it down the way you got it.

Misery's the river of the world. Everybody row!

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

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

You can drive out nature with a pitch fork
But it always comes roaring back again.

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

There ain't no devil, only God when he's drunk.

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.

A mental midget with the IQ of a fence post.

I took a hundred dollars from a blindman's hand.

All that you've loved is all you own

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

Don't plant your days they turn into weeds

There's no prayer like desire.

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.

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

Disneyland is Vegas for children.

Well I got a bad liver and broken heart,
yeah,I drunk me a river since you
tore me apart

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.

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

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

There ain't no devil, it's just God when he's drunk.

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

And when they pulled her from the wreck, you know, she still had on her shades

Folks who work here are professors. Don't replace all the knowers with guessors keep'em open they're the ears of the town

The blues and gospel stuff seemed to go together.

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

Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.

Time is just memory
Mixed in with Desire.

My friends think I'm ugly, I gotta masculine face.

And I'm standing on the corner of Fifth and Vermouth.

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

I don't like the stigma that comes with being called a poet ... So I call what I'm doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue.

And I remember quiet evenings trembling close to you ...

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

Cross my wooden leg, swear on my glass eye.

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

The beginning of it starts at the end

There's a beauty of show business. It's the only business you can have a career in when you're dead.

She pulls a razor from her boot and a thousand victims fall around her feet.

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

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

All my friends are dead, or else they're not feeling too good.

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

I'll be clickin' by your house about two forty-five, Sidewalk Sundae Strawberry Surprise.