On my gravestone, I want it to say, “I told you I was sick.”
TOM WAITSit ain’t no sin, to take off your skin and dance around in your bones
More Tom Waits Quotes
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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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Don’t look back, because someone might be gaining on you.
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It’s rather mystifying when you think about writing songs – where they come from, and how they’re born.
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I always thought songs are movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.
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I don’t like hearing Beatles songs in commercials. It almost renders them useless. I think, ‘Oh God, another one bites the dust.’
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The blues is like a planet. It’s an enormous topic. You can’t ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It’s a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don’t know where I would be. It’s indelible and indispensable.
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We are all just monkeys with money and guns.
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If there’s one thing you can say about mankind, there’s nothing kind about man.
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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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The folks who know the truth aren’t talking. The ones who don’t have a clue, you can’t shut them up!
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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.
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Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.
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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
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Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing with the air.
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We have a deficit of wonder right now.
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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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You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.
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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.
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And the earth died screaming, while I lay dreaming.
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I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.
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Bill Hicks – blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer, and brain specialist. He will correct your vision. Others will drive on the road he built.
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I’m always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you’re drowning, and it’s there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.
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Well I got a bad liver and broken heart, yeah, I drunk me a river since you tore me apart.
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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.
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You can drive out nature with a pitch fork But it always comes roaring back again.
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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