Tom Waits

“Arithmetic arithmetockTurn the hands back on the clockHow does the ocean rock the boat?How did the razor find my throat?The only strings that hold me hereAre tangled up around the pier.”

“There ain't no devil there's just god when he's drunk”

“I'm not fighting for justice. I am not fighting for freedom. I am fighting for my life and another day in the world here.”

“I admit that I ain't no angel, I admit that I ain't no saint-- I'm selfish and I'm cruel and I'm blind. If I exorcise my devils, well my angels may leave too. When they leave they're so hard to find...”

“Picture in a frame”

“Don't you know there ain't no devil; there's just God when he's drunk.”

“The higher that the monkey can climb, the more he shows his tail.Call no man happy till he dies, there's no milk at the bottom of the pail.God builds a church and the devil builds a chapel, like the thistles that are growing 'round the trunk of a tree.All the good in the world you could put inside a thimble, and still have room for you and me.If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man.You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it always coming roaring back again.Misery's the river of the world, misery's the river of the world.Everybody row, everybody row;misery's the river of the world.”

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

“There's no prayer like desire.”

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

“There’s nothing more embarrassing than a person who tries to guess what the great American public would like, makes a compromise for the first time, and falls flat on his face… I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else’s. That’s a difficult statement to live up to, but then I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.”

“El Diablo hizo el mundo mientras Dios estaba durmiendo.”

“And they all pretend they're OrphansAnd their memory's like a trainYou can see it getting smaller as it pulls awayAnd the things you can't rememberTell the things you can't forget thatHistory puts a saint in every dream”

“Sing me a rainbow. Steal me a dream.”

“i never told the truth so i can never tell a lie...”

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”

“God's away, God's away, God's away on business. Business!”

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

“He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.”

“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.”

“using parking meters as walking sticks.”

“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.”

“The Universe is making music all the time.”

“My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.”

“I danced along a colored wind/Dangled from a rope of sand”

“Let me fall out of the window/With confetti in my hair”

“They say that I have no hits and that I'm difficult to work with. And they say that like it's a bad thing.”

“The beginning of it starts at the end”

“All that you've loved is all you own”

“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'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”

“You got to tell me the brave captain Why are the wicked so strong? How do the angels get to sleepWhen the devil leaves the porch light on?”

“Time is just memoryMixed in with Desire.”

“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.”

“T’ain’t no sin to take off your skin, and dance around in your bones.”

“Never have your wallet with you onstage. It's bad luck. You shouldn't play the piano with money in your pocket. Play like you need the money.Tom Waits (to me, about 1986 or so)”

“it seems a stray bullet actually pierced the testicle of a Union soldier and lodged itself in the ovaries of a woman standing approximately 100 ft. away. She's alright, the baby's doing fine...ofcourse the soldier's a little pissed off...”

“And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget that history puts a saint in every dream.”

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”

“It's cold out there, colder than a ticket taker's smile at the Ivar Theatre on a Saturday night.”

“We are all just monkeys with money and guns.”

“This is about all the bad days in the world. I used to have some little bad days, and I kept them in a little box. And one day, I threw them out into the yard. "Oh, it's just a couple little innocent bad days." Well, we had a big rain. I don't know what it was growing in but I think we used to put eggshells out there and coffee grounds, too. Don't plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me. Choke those little bad days. Choke 'em down to nothin'. They're your days. Choke 'em!”

“bringing up children was]like living with a bunch of drunks...you really have to be on your toes all the time.”

“It's very hard to stop doing things you're used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.”

“You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.”

“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.”

“Most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit that remains the object of their long relentless quest. The obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending, the pursuit you see and never the arrest" - Tom Waits "Foreign Affairs”

“Now its raining its pouringthe old man is snoringnow I lay me down to sleepI hear the sirens in the streetall my dreams are made of chromeI have no way to get back homeI’d rather die before I wakelike Marilyn Monroeand throw my dreams out inthe street and therain make ‘em grow”

“It's the same with men as with horses and dogs, nothing wants to die.”

“The piano has been drinking, not me.”