Tom Waits Quotes

Tom Waits delivers gritty, off-kilter humor about music, art and late-night thoughts.

67 quotes

1. And sometime around 2 AM you end up taking advantage of yourself. Ain't no way around that. Making a scene with a magazine.

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

3. I'm so goddamn horny, the crack of dawn better be careful around me!

4. She called me Hen Fap Thomas, said that I was something that she needed to have!

5. Your veal cutlet gets up off the plate, It walks down to end of the counter and beat the shit out of my cup of coffee. I guess the coffee just wasn't strong enough to defend itself.

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

7. And the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget that history puts a saint in every dream.

8. The piano has been drinking, not me.

9. If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man.

10. What's he building in there? We have a right to know.

11. Come down off the cross, we can use the wood.

12. And someone will head south 'til this whole thing cools off.

13. And their mouths are cut like razor blades, and their eyes are like stilettos, and her radiator's steaming and her teeth are in a wreck, she won't let you kiss her, but what in the hell do you expect?

14. If you get far enough away you'll be on your way back home.

15. The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.

16. Some men are searching for the Holy Grail, but there ain't nothing sweeter than riding the rail.

17. Pregnant women and Vietnam vets, beggin on the freeway, bout as hard as it gets.

18. 'I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.'

19. 'Our Father, who art in Krebari, hallowed be thy glass. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in the lounges. Give us this day our daily splash, and forgive us our hangovers as we forgive those who continue to hangover against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil...and somebody give us all a ride home.'

20. 'Disneyland is Vegas for children.'

21. (When asked for advice for younger musicians) 'Break windows, smoke cigars, and stay up late. Tell 'em to do that, they'll find a little pot of gold.'

22. The dog won't bite if you beat Him with a bone

23. Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends

24. 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.

25. I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

26. 'I don't have fun. Actually, I had fun once. In 1962. I drank a whole bottle of Robitussin cough medicine and went in the back of a 1961 powder-blue Lincoln Continental to a James Brown concert with some Mexican friends of mine. I haven't had fun since. It's not a word I like. It's like Volkswagens or bell-bottoms, or patchouli oil or bean sprouts. It rubs me up the wrong way. I might go out and have an educational and entertaining evening, but I don't have fun.'

27. 'I like to walk out of a diner with enough gas to open a Mobil station.'

28. 'I was born in the back seat of a Yellow Cab in a hospital loading zone and with the meter still running. I emerged needing a shave and shouted 'Time Square, and step on it!''

29. In response to a heckler at his concert at Toronto's Massey Hall in the late 1980's who complained that he could not hear Waits, he replied: 'I haven't screamed as much since the pigs ate my baby brother!'

30. Apparently the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad - ideally naked and purring on the hood of a new car . I have adamantly and repeatedly refused this dubious honor.

31. 'When he performs, it sounds as if the world has stopped at 2 A.M.' - Dinah Shore

32. 'I always wondered how Tom Waits would sing 'Greensleeves'....' --Loreena McKennitt, 'The Visit'

33. '...like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car' --Unknown critic when commenting on his voice

34. '...like a clown crossed with a cherry bomb.' --Anonymous young girl, liner notes to Used Songs: 1973-1980

35. '...he's really awesome and really horrible' --Anonymous young boy, 2007.

36. 'It's like he swallowed a roll of sandpaper' - Anon boy 2008

37. '...like how you'd sound if you drank a quart of bourbon, smoked a pack of cigarettes and swallowed a pack of razor blades. . . . Late at night. After not sleeping for three days.' -- Anonymous fan[1]

38. Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you're mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.

39. Bill Hicks - blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer, and brain specialist. He will correct your vision. Others will drive on the road he built.

40. I'll tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past…

41. 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.

42. I'm trying to learn how to write faster.

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

44. 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.

45. There's not much difference between what I appear to be on stage and what I am. I think people like that, that I'm not trying to pull a caper.

46. Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.

47. The devil knows the Bible like the back of his hand.

48. I bark my voice out through a closed throat, pretty much. It's more, perhaps, like a dog in some ways. It does have its limitations, but I'm learning different ways to keep it alive.

49. There's a beauty of show business. It's the only business you can have a career in when you're dead.

50. I used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3 A.M.

51. The things you absorb you will ultimately secrete. It's all out there and available for you to enjoy...and be nourished by.

52. Photos are profound because they have such short lives. They are more like fingerprints, dead leaves, rain puddles, or the corpses of flies.

53. 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.

54. It's hard to win when you always lose.

55. 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.

56. 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.

57. 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.

58. There's a certain fast-food approach to the whole music thing that's changed the role it plays for us all. You are doing it while you are doing other things. Not that that is new - people have had music on in the background as long as there has been music.

59. 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.

60. If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back, it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.

61. Oh, I got a beautiful 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille four-door. No one will ride in it with me.

62. I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.

63. Francis Ford Coppola is completely unconventional. He has a strong sense of loyalty. Great eyes. It's a diabolical undertaking in terms of organization and leadership.

64. I have a Chamberlain I bought from some surfers in Westwood many years ago. It's an early analog synthesizer; it operates on tape loops. It has 60 voices - everything from galloping horses to owls to rain to every instrument in the orchestra.

65. Some day I'm gonna be gone and people will be listening to my songs and conjuring me up. In order for that to happen, you gotta put something of yourself in it.

66. I didn't really want to be part of a clique or a niche. But I also was looking for my own voice, as a writer, y'know? And a world I could call my own.

67. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a person who tries to guess what the great American public would like, makes a compromise for the first time, and falls flat on his face… I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else’s. That’s a difficult statement to live up to, but then I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.