450 Quotes by Tom Waits

Jesus Christ, this godamn rain, will someone put me on a train.

Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning.

Photos are profound because they have such short lives. They are more like fingerprints, dead leaves, rain puddles, or the corpses of flies.

Words are music, really.

He said, I'm better off without her, until I showed him my tattoo.

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.

I'm not one of those people the tabloids chase around.

Your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they've been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don't explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing. I'm learning to break those habits by playing instruments I know absolutely nothing about, like a bassoon or a waterphone.

The average person spends two weeks over their lifetime waiting for the traffic light to change.