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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Tom Waits Quotes

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.

– Tom Waits

You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty. I don’t want to live any other way.

– Tom Waits

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall… and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl’s name that you just made up.

– 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

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

– Tom Waits

Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.

– Tom Waits

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.

– Tom Waits

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.

– Tom Waits

I’m so horny the crack of dawn better watch out.

– Tom Waits

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.

– Tom Waits

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.

– Tom Waits

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

– Tom Waits

I hate Disneyland. It primes our kids for Las Vegas.

– Tom Waits

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.

– Tom Waits

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

– Tom Waits

The piano has been drinking, not me.

– 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

What you want is for music to love you back. That’s why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it.

– Tom Waits

George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.

– Tom Waits

George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.

– Tom Waits

I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.

– Tom Waits

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.

– Tom Waits

Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting.

– Tom Waits

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.

– 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

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

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.

– Tom Waits

I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I’m an amateur physician, I guess.

– Tom Waits

When I was younger, I wanted to be older. Now I am older, I am not quite so sure.

– Tom Waits

Somebody said I sound like an old lady, and I was really insulted by that. I’m trying to sound like Skip James and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye.

– Tom Waits

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