450 Quotes by Tom Waits

They called it the Terminal Bar but they had no idea that like twenty years later the place’d be filling up with terminal cases.

You don’t meet nice girls in coffee shops.

You know, people only travel really with their seeds, and with their songs. In Bosnia they interviewed a lot of refugees... they’d left with nothing and they asked them what they had, and they had seeds in their pockets from their gardens and their songs. That was it. Once you’re nourished in that most fundamental way, everything else follows.

There ain’t no such thing as the devil that’s just god when he’s drunk.

Never trust a scarecrow wearin’ shades after dark.

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

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. You find that out really fast.

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.

I'm usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page. Some people write for the page, and that's a whole other thing. I'm going for what it sounds like right away, so it may not even look good on the page.