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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.

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
Restaurants
Worked
Jukebox
Years
Knelt
Altar
Altars
Charles
Restaurant
Rays

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New York forces you to be in endless surreal situations.
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Let me fall out of the window/ With confetti in my hair
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There's only one reason why you write new songs: You get sick of the old songs. It's not that I didn't do anything during the time when I wrote no songs. I was creative, but in another way. I had ideas for songs and collected the ideas.
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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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She pulls a razor from her boot and a thousand victims fall around her feet.
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using parking meters as walking sticks.
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Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it.
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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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I'll take a rusty nail and scratch your initials on my arm.
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but it's so hard to dance that way when it's cold and there's no music.
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For a songwriter, you dont really go to songwriting school you learn by listening to tunes.
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You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.
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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.
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I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.
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It was a hubba, hubba, ding dang, baby you are just everythang.
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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.
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When you're a kid and you're trying to find your own voice, it's rather daunting to hear somebody like Howlin' Wolf, because you know that you'll never achieve that.
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Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
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I hope I'm becoming more eccentric. More room in the brain.
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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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