Tom Waits Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

Leona Helmsley's dog made $12 million last year... and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio, made $30,000. It's just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains.

Not the kind of wheel you fall asleep at.

There's always free cheddar in the mousetrap, baby.

Don't plant your days they turn into weeds

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

Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.

On my gravestone, I want it to say, "I told you I was sick."

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

And the earth died screaming, while I lay dreaming.

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.

The piano has been drinking, not me.

You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.

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!'

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.

You're innocent when you dream.

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.

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.

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

All that you've loved is all you own

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

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

You've gotta have somebody to trust, that knows a lot.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I've lost my equilibrium, my car keys, and my pride.

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

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

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

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

Photos are profound because they have such short lives. They are more like fingerprints, dead leaves, rain puddles, or the corpses of flies.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.

We are all just monkeys with money and guns.

I was always laughing in 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.

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

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