“Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On”

“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)”

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

“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.”

“The ship is sinkingThe ship is sinkingThere's leak, there's a leak,in the boiler roomThe poor, the lame, the blindWho ore the ones that we kept inchargeKillers, thieves, and lawyersGod's Away, God's awayGod's away on Business”

“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.”

“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.”