“I made a wish on a sliver of moonlight A sly grin and a bowl full of stars”- Tom Waits. Here are 27 Top Tom Waits Quotes.
Tom Waits Quotes
1. “The average person spends two weeks over their lifetime waiting for the traffic light to change.”- Tom Waits
2. “I do some acting. And there’s a difference between “I do some acting” and “I’m an actor.”- Tom Waits
3. “I finally discovered that my life is more important than show business.”- Tom Waits
4. “It’s a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.”- Tom Waits
5. “Sometimes when you’re making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning.”
— Tom Waits
6. “I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”
— Tom Waits
7. “The folks who know the truth aren’t talking… The ones who don’t have a clue, you can’t shut them up!”
— Tom Waits
Tom Waits Quotes
8. “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.”
— Tom Waits
9. “You’ve gotta have somebody to trust, that knows a lot.”
— Tom Waits
10. “It’s terrible for the culture of music. Like anything that is purely economic, it ignores the most important component.”
— Tom Waits
11. “A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.”
— Tom Waits
12. “The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.”– Tom Waits
13. “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.”
— Tom Waits
14. “I’m not one of those people the tabloids chase around.”- Tom Waits
Tom Waits Quotes
15. “If you are recording, you are recording. I don’t believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal. The drama around even sitting in the car and singing into a tape recorder that’s as big as your hand – waiting until it’s very quiet, doing your thing, and then playing it back and hoping you like it – is the same basic anatomy as when you’re in the recording studio, really. Sometimes it’s better that way because some of the pressure is off and you can pretend it’s throwaway.”
— Tom Waits
16. “Bringing up children was like living with a bunch of drunks…you really have to be on your toes all the time.”
— Tom Waits
17. “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.”
— Tom Waits
18. “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.”
— Tom Waits
19. “Songs are pretty easy. They are small, they are modular, they are about as big as a bagel. They are easy to build. Films are overwhelming in their magnitude and scope. By comparison, a lot of film directors wish they were writing songs because you can do it while getting your hair cut.”
— Tom Waits
20. “I just don’t like the word ‘fun’–it’s like Volkswagen, or bell-bottoms, or patchouli-oil or bean-sprouts…it rubs me up the wrong way.”
— Tom Waits
21. “When I was younger, I wanted to be older. Now I am older, I am not quite so sure.”
— Tom Waits
Tom Waits Quotes
22. “There’s a certain fast-food approach to the whole music thing that’s changed the role it plays for us all. You are doing it while you are doing other things. Not that that is new – people have had music on in the background as long as there has been music.”
— Tom Waits
23. “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.”
— Tom Waits
24. “All medical procedures require two hands, so in a sense, it’s like when you play an instrument. That’s what they call things that they use in their work: They call them instruments. A lot of people start out majoring in medicine and drop it and change their major to music.”
— Tom Waits
25. “She’s got the whole dark forest living inside of her.”
— Tom Waits
26. “You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.”
— Tom Waits
27. “With families and music, you’re usually looking for something that can make you unique.”
— Tom Waits