Quotes by Tom Waits

“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...”

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”

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

“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.”

“The Universe is making music all the time.”

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

“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 co...”

“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”

“Ive always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around this is an inte...”

“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 ...”

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

“I made a wish on a sliver of moonlightA sly grin and a bowl full of stars”

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

“You must have brought the bad weather with youThe sky's the color of leadAll you've left me is a featherOn an unmade bed”

“Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.”

“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.”

“We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.”

“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 t...”

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

“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'...”