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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.

Tom Waits

Well, it’s either kiss me or kill me, that’s how I see it.
TOM WAITS

Kill Kiss Myself See
Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.
TOM WAITS

Capture End Feature Song Writing
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
TOM WAITS

Abundance Bury Happiness Information Quantity Wealth Weight
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

Best Better Care Children Growth Oneself
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

Alive Hands Ideas Music Time Yourself
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.
TOM WAITS

Application Fill Myself Sex Start Writing
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.
TOM WAITS

Detail Intimate Myself Perfection Problem Thinking
There’s a beauty of show business. It’s the only business you can have a career in when you’re dead.
TOM WAITS

Beautiful Business Career Death Show Yourself
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.
TOM WAITS

Learning Listening Oneself Song Wonder Writing
The way you do anything is the way you do everything.
TOM WAITS

Action Style Way Yourself
I like turning on two radios at once. I like hearing things wrong. I get a lot of ideas by mishearing things.
TOM WAITS

Hear Ideas Myself Wrong
Come down off the cross, we could use the wood.
TOM WAITS

Cross Wood
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.
TOM WAITS

Afraid Conversation Death Live Music Telephone
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

Appreciation Greatness Music Myself Vocabulary
You learn as much from your kids as they learn from you.
TOM WAITS

Children Learning Yourself
I’m the type of guy who’d sell you a rat’s asshole for a wedding ring.
TOM WAITS

Guy Ring Sell Type

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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