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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

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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
Music
Ignores
Important
Component
Like
Components
Purely
Terrible
Economic
Culture
Anything

More quotes by Tom Waits

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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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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 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.
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It's hard to win when you always lose.
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You know what I really love? The CD players in a car. How when you put the CD right up by the slot, it actually takes it out of your hand, like it's hungry. It pulls it in, and you feel like it wants more silver discs.
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New York forces you to be in endless surreal situations.
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It's new, it's improved, it's old fashioned.
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God's away, God's away, God's away on business. Business!
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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
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I saw a crow building a nest, I was watching him very carefully, I was kind of stalking him and he was aware of it. And you know what they do when they become aware of someone stalking them when they build a nest, which is a very vulnerable place to be? They build a decoy nest. It's just for you.
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A mental midget with the IQ of a fence post.
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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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I danced along a colored wind/ Dangled from a rope of sand
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The things you absorb you will ultimately secrete. It's all out there and available for you to enjoy...and be nourished by.
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Most songs that aren't jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs.
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The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
Tom Waits
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I did my time in the jail of your arms
Tom Waits
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In terms of black music - the only music that we can call our own, that was really born here - I don't think a lot has been done to chronicle the relations between American history and where black music fits in.
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All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes
Tom Waits
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Unfortunately, I made the mistake at one point of putting my address on the back of one of my albums, just to find out what would happen. I received a lot of disturbing mail and calls. Actually, I was living in a hotel, so it was easy enough to find the number. I got a kick out of it for a while. Then I realized what I'd done.
Tom Waits