Not the kind of wheel you fall asleep at.
TOM WAITSWe are all just monkeys with money and guns.
More Tom Waits Quotes
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I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.
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There’s nothing that makes me laugh more than being in the situation where you’re not supposed to laugh. Funerals. People crying. Breaking down. Telling you their life. I’m the worst. I’m the worst at that.
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Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me – choke those little bad days. Choke ’em down to nothing.
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The average person spends two weeks over their lifetime waiting for the traffic light to change.
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Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing with the air.
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But it’s so hard to dance that way when it’s cold and there’s no music.
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I like turning on two radios at once. I like hearing things wrong. I get a lot of ideas by mishearing things.
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The way you do anything is the way you do everything.
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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.
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I made a wish on a sliver of moonlight A sly grin and a bowl full of stars.
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The trick is to have a career and have a family. It’s like having two dogs that hate each other and you have to take them for a walk every night.
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Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don’t get out much. It’s true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.
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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.
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Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.
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Their memory’s like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can’t remember Tell the things you can’t forget that History puts a saint in every dream.
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I do some acting. And there’s a difference between “I do some acting” and “I’m an actor.”
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You’re my North Star when I’m lost and feeling blue.
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You have to keep busy. After all, no dog’s ever pissed on a moving car.
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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.
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I put food on the table and roof overhead. But I’d trade it all tomorrow for the highway instead.
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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.
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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.
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We have a deficit of wonder right now.
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I’m the type of guy who’d sell you a rat’s asshole for a wedding ring.
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People get frightened that success is going to take them out of life. They’re no longer going to be on the corner of Bedlam and Squalor; life will only be something you can get through the mail.
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All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes
TOM WAITS