450 Quotes by Tom Waits

There's no prayer like desire.

The trick is to have a career and have a family. It's like having two dogs that hate each other and you have to take them for a walk every night.

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.

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

Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you're mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.

I worry about a lot of things, but I don’t worry about achievements. I worry primarily about whether there are nightclubs in Heaven.

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.

I can't listen to so much music at the same time. I think you really have to have a diet. You're just processing too much, there's no place to put it. If you go a long time without hearing music, then you hear music that nobody else hears.

You want soldiers who, when they get to a river after a long march, don't start rooting for their canteen in their pack, but just dive right in.