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.Collection: Happiness
Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.Collection: God
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.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Car
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.Collection: Cool
My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: History
If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.Collection: Music
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.
I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.
When I was younger, I wanted to be older. Now I am older, I am not quite so sure.
Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.
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.
I didn't really identify with the music of my own generation, but I was very curious about the music of others.
The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.
Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music.
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.
I don't know if any genuine, meaningful change could ever result from a song. It's kind of like throwing peanuts at a gorilla.
Sometimes words are just music themselves. Like 'Chicago' is a very musical sounding name.
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.
When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
I'm so horny the crack of dawn better watch out.
I used to imagine that making it in music - really making it in music - is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture.
I think I have an adrenaline addiction, no question about that.
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.
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.
Oh, I got a beautiful 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille four-door. No one will ride in it with me.
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.
I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.
I have an audio stigmatism whereby I hear things wrong - I have audio illusions.
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.
The piano has been drinking, not me.
I used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3 A.M.
Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting.
My first big gig was an opening show for Frank Zappa, and I think that was difficult.
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.
George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.
All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.
I don't really like listening to the radio so much.
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.
I look for things that are left of center, something you've only seen your whole life, but never heard. Hit it! With a stick! I have a guitar made out of a 2x4 that I bought in Cleveland.
I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have.
If you are making a record, you are the one saying 'action', and you are the one saying 'cut,' and you have to be sure that the most interesting thing is not going on outside the frame.