Tom Waits Quotes

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

I started out with nothing and I still got most of it left.

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.

A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't.

You have to keep busy. After all, no dog's ever pissed on a moving car.

The folks who know the truth aren't talking.... The ones who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up!

There's always free cheddar in the mousetrap, baby.

Once upon a time there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. And they grew next to each other. And every day the straight tree would look at the crooked tree and he would say, "You're crooked. You've always been crooked and you'll continue to be crooked. But look at me! Look at me!" said the straight tree. He said, "I'm tall and I'm straight." And then one day the lumberjacks came into the forest and looked around, and the manager in charge said, "Cut all the straight trees." And that crooked tree is still there to this day, growing strong and growing strange.

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in.

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

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

Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now.

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.

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

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

If I exorcise my devils, all my angels may go, too.

Come down off the cross, we could use the wood.

The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.

I always thought songs are movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.

Sing me a rainbow. Steal me a dream.

You cannot really be too concerned with what people think of you. You're on your own adventure of growth and discovery. So it's not always good to be who people think you are, especially if you subscribe to it as well ... which is easily done, because then you don't have to figure out who you are, you just ask somebody else.

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

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

She's got the whole dark forest living inside of her.