-
By AnonymTom Waits
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.
00 -
By AnonymTom 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.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
A mental midget with the IQ of a fence post.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
...and I'm standing on the corner of Fifth and Vermouth.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
and when they pulled her from the wreck, you know, she still had on her shades
00 -
By AnonymTom 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)
00 -
By AnonymTom 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.
00 -
By AnonymTom 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.
00 -
By AnonymTom 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.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
Bill Hicks - blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer, and brain specialist. He will correct your vision. Others will drive on the road he built.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
Break windows, smoke cigars, and stay up late. Tell 'em to do that, they'll find a little pot of gold.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
bringing up children was]like living with a bunch of drunks...you really have to be on your toes all the time.
00 -
By AnonymTom 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.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
Chevrolet was puzzled when they discovered that their sales for the Chevy Nova were off the charts everywhere but in Latin America. They finally realized that "Nova" in Spanish translates to "no go." Not the best name for a car... anywhere "no va.
00 -
By AnonymTom 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.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
Come down off the cross, we could use the wood.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
Cross my wooden leg, swear on my glass eye.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
Disneyland is Vegas for children.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
Don't plant your days they turn into weeds
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
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.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
For a songwriter, you dont really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
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.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
Francis Ford Coppola is completely unconventional. He has a strong sense of loyalty. Great eyes. It's a diabolical undertaking in terms of organization and leadership.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
Got 27 children I never see.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
Got a head full of lightning, a hat full of rain.
00 -
By AnonymTom 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.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
He said, I'm better off without her, until I showed him my tattoo.
00 -
By AnonymTom 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.
00 -
By AnonymTom 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.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We're all looking at the wrapping. But we won't tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
I can't listen to so much music at the same time. I think you really have to have a diet. You're just processing too much, there's no place to put it. If you go a long time without hearing music, then you hear music that nobody else hears.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
I danced along a colored wind/ Dangled from a rope of sand
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
I did my time in the jail of your arms
00 -
By AnonymTom 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.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I'm an amateur physician, I guess.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
I don't go to church on Sunday, don't get on my knees to pray, or memorize the books of the Bible, I got my own special way
00 -
By AnonymTom 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.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
I don't like hearing Beatles songs in commercials. It almost renders them useless. I think, 'Oh God, another one bites the dust.'
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
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.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
I don't really like listening to the radio so much.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
I don't think that you should be perfectly candid and frank about the intimate details of your personal life with the public at large. Subsequently, it creates considerable personal problems.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
I dunno when I started writing really. I was, like, filling out applications and stuff real early. Last name first, first name last, sex. 'occasionally' , stuff like that. Then I was writing letters, filling out forms, writing on bathroom walls.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
If I exorcise my devils, all my angels may go, too.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
I finally discovered that my life is more important than show business.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
If I want to walk out in the desert and heat up a can of beans on a fire, I still can. In those movies like Gattaca or whatever, the space age stuff is always all there is. But in the world there is never just one way of living. It's more like a big junkyard. Put it this way: I'm not afraid I'm going to end up on a space station in aluminium-foil underwear.
00 -
By AnonymTom 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.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
If you are recording, you are recording. I don't believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal. The drama around even sitting in the car and singing into a tape recorder that's as big as your hand - waiting until it's very quiet, doing your thing, and then playing it back and hoping you like it - is the same basic anatomy as when you're in the recording studio, really. Sometimes it's better that way because some of the pressure is off and you can pretend it's throwaway.
00 -
By AnonymTom Waits
If you are recording, you are recording. I don't believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal.
00