Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting.
— Tom Waits
Most songs that aren't jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs.
I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have.
My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
I hate Disneyland. It primes our kids for Las Vegas.
I'm just trying to make a buck like everyone else.
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.
The piano has been drinking, not me.
If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.
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.
Sometimes the magnetism of a song is impossible to ignore, and it demands that it be sung in a certain way.
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.
The sight of the first woman in the minimal two-piece was as explosive as the detonation of the atomic bomb by the U.S. at Bikini Island in the Marshall Isles, hence the naming of the bikini.
Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.
It's hard to win when you always lose.
I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.
Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.
When I was younger, I wanted to be older. Now I am older, I am not quite so sure.
You know when you throw a party, you think people will show up and no one will like each other. It's like that with music - parts of your musical psyche have never met other parts. You wonder if you should get them together.
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.
George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.
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.
George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.
I'm so horny the crack of dawn better watch out.
The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.
Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it. You find that out really fast.
I saw a crow building a nest, I was watching him very carefully, I was kind of stalking him and he was aware of it. And you know what they do when they become aware of someone stalking them when they build a nest, which is a very vulnerable place to be? They build a decoy nest. It's just for you.
