Tom Waits Quotes - Page 3

I made a wish on a sliver of moonlight A sly grin and a bowl full of stars

Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don't get out much. It's true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.

I never told the truth so i can never tell a lie.

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.

Don't look back, because someone might be gaining on you.

The Universe is making music all the time.

I've been riding on the crest of a slump lately.

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 it; they'll just make another one.

when your down on your luck and you've lost all your dreams theres nothing like a campfire and a can of beans

I did my time in the jail of your arms

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

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.

Got a head full of lightning, a hat full of rain.

You're innocent when you dream.

I'm the type of guy who'd sell you a rat's asshole for a wedding ring.

We are all just monkeys with money and guns.

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

I'm interested in things when I don't know what they are. Like "Hey, Ray, what the hell is this?" Oh, that's lipstick from the 1700s, that's dog food from the turn of the century, that's a hat from World War II. I'm interested in the minutiae of things. Oddities.

You learn as much from your kids as they learn from you.

There's nothing that makes me laugh more than being in the situation where you're not supposed to laugh. Funerals. People crying. Breaking down. Telling you their life. I'm the worst. I'm the worst at that.

I’ve 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 interesting one, it’s amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something.

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

it ain't no sin, to take off your skin and dance around in your bones

I don't like the stigma that comes with being called a poet . . . So I call what I'm doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue.

There's no prayer like desire.