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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.

Tom Waits

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Tom Waits
Age: 74
Born: 1949
Born: December 7
Actor
Composer
Guitarist
Jazz Guitarist
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Writer
Pomona
California
Thomas Alan Waits
Gun
Composer
Weight
Guns
Wealth
Quantity
Information
Beneath
Knowledge
Abundance
Happiness
Buried
Money
Confused
Overabundance
Confusion
Monkeys

More quotes by Tom Waits

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I like turning on two radios at once. I like hearing things wrong… I get a lot of ideas by mishearing things.
Tom Waits
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The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable.
Tom Waits
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It's new, it's improved, it's old fashioned.
Tom Waits
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Now it's closing time/the music's fading out.
Tom Waits
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I don't know if any genuine meaningful change could ever result from a song. It's kind of like throwing peanuts at a gorilla.
Tom Waits
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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.
Tom Waits
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The sight of the first woman in the minimal two-piece was as explosive as the detonation of the atomic bomb by the U.S. at Bikini Island in the Marshall Isles, hence the naming of the bikini.
Tom Waits
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and when they pulled her from the wreck, you know, she still had on her shades
Tom Waits
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Popular music is like a big party, and it’s a thrill sneaking in rather than being invited. Every once in a while, a guy with his shirt on inside out, wearing lipstick and a pillbox hat gets a chance to speak.
Tom Waits
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...and I'm standing on the corner of Fifth and Vermouth.
Tom Waits
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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
Tom Waits
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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 nothing.
Tom Waits
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Photos are profound because they have such short lives. They are more like fingerprints, dead leaves, rain puddles, or the corpses of flies.
Tom Waits
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Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.
Tom Waits
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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
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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.
Tom Waits
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Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.
Tom Waits
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If people are a little nervous about approaching you at the market, it's good. I'm not Chuckles The Clown. Or Bozo. I don't cut the ribbon at the opening of markets. I don't stand next to the mayor. Hit your baseball into my yard, and you'll never see it again.
Tom Waits
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God's away, God's away, God's away on business. Business!
Tom Waits
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It's terrible for the culture of music. Like anything that is purely economic, it ignores the most important component.
Tom Waits