Tom Waits Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Tom Waits

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. — Tom Waits

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. — Tom Waits

I've been riding on the crest of a slump lately. — Tom Waits

I've always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there. — Tom Waits

I don't really like listening to the radio so much. — Tom Waits

He said, I'm better off without her, until I showed him my tattoo. — Tom Waits

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

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. — Tom Waits

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 — Tom Waits

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

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

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

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

I was always laughing in church. — Tom Waits

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

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

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

Words are music, really. — Tom Waits

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

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable. — Tom Waits

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

Now its raining its pouring
the old man is snoring
now I lay me down to sleep
I hear the sirens in the street
all my dreams are made of chrome
I have no way to get back home
I'd rather die before I wake
like Marilyn Monroe
and throw my dreams out in
the street and the
rain make 'em grow — Tom Waits

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

There's only one reason why you write new songs: You get sick of the old songs. It's not that I didn't do anything during the time when I wrote no songs. I was creative, but in another way. I had ideas for songs and collected the ideas. — Tom Waits

I'm trying to get music ideas that come and keep them alive. It's like carrying water in your hands. I want to keep it all, and sometimes by the time you get to the studio you have nothing. — Tom Waits

It seems a stray bullet actually pierced the testicle of a Union soldier and lodged itself in the ovaries of a woman standing approximately 100 ft. away. She's alright, the baby's doing fine ... ofcourse the soldier's a little pissed off ... — Tom Waits

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

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

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. — Tom Waits

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. — Tom Waits

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

Arithmetic arithmetock
Turn the hands back on the clock
How does the ocean rock the boat?
How did the razor find my throat?
The only strings that hold me here
Are tangled up around the pier. — Tom Waits

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

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

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

Anton brings the camera. I'll bring a tuba, wear black, not shave, and take us to a burned-down Chinese restaurant. (On being photographed by his longtime photo collaborator Anton Corbijn) — Tom Waits

I bark my voice out through a closed throat, pretty much. It's more, perhaps, like a dog in some ways. It does have its limitations, but I'm learning different ways to keep it alive. — Tom Waits

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

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

Well it's hotter 'n blazes and all the long faces / there'll be no oasis for a dry local grazier — Tom Waits

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

I don't know what the 'big time' is. — Tom Waits

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

People make songs so that somebody else will hear them and want to do them. I guess it's an indication that the songs aren't so ultra-personal that they can't possibly be interpreted by anyone else. — Tom Waits

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

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. — Tom Waits

I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in. — Tom Waits

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

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

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

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. — Tom Waits

It's hard to win when you always lose. — Tom Waits

Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don't care if they lose it; they'll just make another one. — Tom Waits

Slept all night in the cedar grove, i was born to ramble, born to rove, some men are searchin' for the holy grail, but there ain't nothin' sweeter than ridin' the rails — 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 guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have. — Tom Waits

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

Most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit that remains the object of their long relentless quest. The obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending, the pursuit you see and never the arrest" - Tom Waits "Foreign Affairs — Tom Waits

God's away, God's away, God's away on business. Business! — Tom Waits

They have removed the struggle to find anything. And therefore there is no genuine sense of discovery. Struggle is the first thing we know getting along the birth canal, out in the world. It's pretty basic. Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you'd go in this dusty old place and they might point you toward something that would change your life. All that's gone. — 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

If you can make a little painting for the ears with a few words, well, I like words: I like cutting them up and finding different ways of saying the same thing. I get into a spell, and it all comes easy. I don't labor over it. I go inside the song. I think you make yourself an antenna for songs, and songs want to be around you. And then they bring other songs along, and then they're all sittin' around, and they're drinking your beer, and they're sleeping on the floor. And they are using the phone. They're rude, thankless little f-ers. — Tom Waits

The Music was like Electric Sugar — Tom Waits

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

I'm interested in things when I don't know what they are. Like "Hey, Ray, what the hell is this?" Oh, that's lipstick from the 1700s, that's dog food from the turn of the century, that's a hat from World War II. I'm interested in the minutiae of things. Oddities. — Tom Waits

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

(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. — Tom Waits

My wife called me a mule. She once said, "I didn't marry a man; I married a mule!" I kept thinking about it. It was in the back of my head. I think it makes a good title for an album. — Tom Waits

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

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

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

Q: What's hard for you?
A: 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. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German. — Tom Waits

It's new, it's improved, it's old fashioned. — Tom Waits

I like Thelonious Monk, he's so gnarled, he's like a piece of machinery that's pulled up the bolts on the floor and gone off on its own. — Tom Waits

I've never been a fan of personality-conflict burgers and identity-crisis omelets with patchouli oil. I function very well on a diet that consists of Chicken Catastrophe and Eggs Overwhelming and a tall, cool Janitor-in-a-Drum. I like to walk out of a restaurant with enough gas to open a Mobil station. — 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

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. — Tom Waits

You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops. — Tom Waits

New York forces you to be in endless surreal situations. — Tom Waits

I walked 500 miles just to see a halo, when I opened my eyes I was blind as can be. — Tom Waits

I admit that I ain't no angel, I admit that I ain't no saint
I'm selfish and I'm cruel and I'm blind. If I exorcise my devils, well my angels may leave too. When they leave they're so hard to find ... — Tom Waits

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 — Tom Waits

The piano has been drinking, not me. — Tom Waits

Are you still jumping out of windows in expensive clothes? — Tom Waits

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

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. — 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

Popular music is like a big party, and it's a thrill sneaking in rather than being invited. Every once in a while, a guy with his shirt on inside out, wearing lipstick and a pillbox hat gets a chance to speak. — Tom Waits

A mental midget with the IQ of a fence post. — Tom Waits

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!' — Tom Waits

If you are making a record, you are the one saying 'action', and you are the one saying 'cut,' and you have to be sure that the most interesting thing is not going on outside the frame. — Tom Waits

If I exorcise my devils, all my angels may go, too. — Tom Waits

There is no such thing as nonfiction. — Tom Waits

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. — Tom Waits

Any image I have, it's just what I do, but it comes off as being very pretentious. When you're a bit in the public astigmatism, anything you do seems like you did it so somebody would see you do it, like showing up at the right parties. — Tom Waits

Not the kind of wheel you fall asleep at. — Tom Waits