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I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

Tom Waits

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Tom Waits
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: December 7
Actor
Composer
Guitarist
Jazz Guitarist
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Writer
Pomona
California
Thomas Alan Waits
Terrible
Beautiful
Music
Things
Like
Melodies
Melody
Telling

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I sold a quart of blood and bought a half a pint of scotch
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Disneyland is Vegas for children.
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People get frightened that success is going to take them out of life. They're no longer going to be on the corner of Bedlam and Squalor life will only be something you can get through the mail.
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For a songwriter, you dont really go to songwriting school you learn by listening to tunes.
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All that you've loved is all you own
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I'm always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you're drowning, and it's there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.
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You know, we just buy music now. We don't make it any more. And that goes for just about everything. I think it's so important that people develop and subscribe to and have confidence in their own ability to make music, however rough it is.
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People make songs so that somebody else will hear them and want to do them. I guess it's an indication that the songs aren't so ultra-personal that they can't possibly be interpreted by anyone else.
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I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have.
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I was a fireman. I lived in the fire sta­tion for about a year. The pay wasn't so good. It was kind of like being in the army, or what I imagine that would be like.
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using parking meters as walking sticks.
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Most changes in music, most exciting things that happen in music, occur through a miscommunication between people I thought you said this. Poetry comes out of that too.
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Now its raining its pouring the old man is snoring now I lay me down to sleep I hear the sirens in the street all my dreams are made of chrome I have no way to get back home I’d rather die before I wake like Marilyn Monroe and throw my dreams out in the street and the rain make ‘em grow
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There's nothing that makes me laugh more than being in the situation where you're not supposed to laugh. Funerals. People crying. Breaking down. Telling you their life. I'm the worst. I'm the worst at that.
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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.
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The blues and gospel stuff seemed to go together.
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I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.
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I'll take a rusty nail and scratch your initials on my arm.
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I used to imagine that making it in music - really making it in music - is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture.
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I walked 500 miles just to see a halo, when I opened my eyes I was blind as can be.
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