Quote

Misery is the River of the World

Tom Waits

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Tom Waits
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: December 7
Actor
Composer
Guitarist
Jazz Guitarist
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Writer
Pomona
California
Thomas Alan Waits
River
Rivers
Misery
World

More quotes by Tom Waits

Image
Leona Helmsley's dog made $12 million last year... and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio, made $30,000. It's just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains.
Tom Waits
Image
The Universe is making music all the time.
Tom Waits
Image
I'm usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page.
Tom Waits
Image
Now it's closing time/the music's fading out.
Tom Waits
Image
Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.
Tom Waits
Image
I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.
Tom Waits
Image
She pulls a razor from her boot and a thousand victims fall around her feet.
Tom Waits
Image
Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.
Tom Waits
Image
I sold a quart of blood and bought a half a pint of scotch
Tom Waits
Image
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
Image
Well it's hotter 'n blazes and all the long faces / there'll be no oasis for a dry local grazier
Tom Waits
Image
Oh I don't mind going to weddings, just as long as it's not my own.
Tom Waits
Image
Any place is good for eavesdropping, if you know how to eavesdrop.
Tom Waits
Image
It wasn't good for my nerves, that kind of work - a fireman. I've got high blood pressure. I get upset easily. I don't think that was a proper career alternative for me.
Tom Waits
Image
They called it the Terminal Bar but they had no idea that like twenty years later the place'd be filling up with terminal cases.
Tom Waits
Image
I like Thelonious Monk, he's so gnarled, he's like a piece of machinery that's pulled up the bolts on the floor and gone off on its own.
Tom Waits
Image
Most songs that aren't jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs.
Tom Waits
Image
George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.
Tom Waits
Image
She's a shiksa goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck...she's outta this world...she's bold, inventive and fearless. That's who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you.
Tom Waits
Image
Well you say that it's gospel, But I know that it's only church.
Tom Waits