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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

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

Arithmetic Boat Finding Hands Hold Myself Ocean
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

Market Myself Nervous Open People See Yourself
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
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
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
Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.
TOM WAITS

Absorb Willing Yourself
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

Ability Confidence Important Music Rough Thinking Yourself
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
Living with kids is like living with a bunch of drunks. You know you really have to be on your toes all the time. Things are falling over and breaking and spilling. If you live on the second story, you really have to keep the windows shut all the time.
TOM WAITS

Break Children Fall Live Time Window Yourself
She’s got the whole dark forest living inside of her.
TOM WAITS

Forest Herself Live
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.
TOM WAITS

Bad Day Growth Plant Yourself
If you get far enough away you’ll be on your way back home.
TOM WAITS

Enough Far Home Yourself
You’re my North Star when I’m lost and feeling blue.
TOM WAITS

Love Relationship Romantic Star Yourself
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.
TOM WAITS

Admire Death Feeling People
I’ll take a rusty nail and scratch your initials on my arm.
TOM WAITS

Initial Myself Scratch
You learn as much from your kids as they learn from you.
TOM WAITS

Children Learning 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.

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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Tom Waits Quotes