Tom Waits Quotes

My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else? they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you. And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest. So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.

~ Tom Waits

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

~ Tom Waits

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, What happened to your hand? And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

~ Tom Waits

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

~ Tom Waits

There ain't no devil, only God when he's drunk.

~ Tom Waits

The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.

~ Tom Waits

a foreign affair juxtaposed with a statesideand domestically approved romantic fancy is mysteriously attractive due to circumstances knowing it will only be parlayed into a memory

~ Tom Waits

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

And I remember quiet evenings trembling close to you...

~ Tom Waits

Well, it's either kiss me or kill me, that's how I see it.

~ Tom Waits

I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.

~ Tom Waits

New York, of course, is to be in endless surreal situations where a fifty-thousand dollar, gun-metal Mercedez pulls up into a puddle of blood, and out steps a twenty-five karat blonde transvestite with a two dollar wristwatch.

~ Tom Waits

You hope people are going to be listening to you after you're gone. And they like you better after you're gone.

~ Tom Waits

As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time.

~ Tom Waits

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

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.

~ Tom Waits

Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.

~ Tom Waits

Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.

~ Tom Waits

My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

~ Tom Waits

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.

~ Tom Waits

You know what I really love? The CD players in a car. How when you put the CD right up by the slot, it actually takes it out of your hand, like it's hungry. It pulls it in, and you feel like it wants more silver discs.

~ Tom Waits

I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.

~ Tom Waits