Quote

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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Tom Waits
Age: 74
Born: 1949
Born: December 7
Actor
Composer
Guitarist
Jazz Guitarist
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Writer
Pomona
California
Thomas Alan Waits
Ideas
Things
Like
Radios
Turning
Hearing
Radio
Wrong
Two

More quotes by Tom Waits

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Did the devil make the world while God was sleeping?
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If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man.
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All that you've loved is all you own
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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.
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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.
Tom Waits
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You hope people are going to be listening to you after you're gone. And they like you better after you're gone.
Tom Waits
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And the earth died screaming, while I lay dreaming.
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There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.
Tom Waits
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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
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Any image I have, it's just what I do, but it comes off as being very pretentious. When you're a bit in the public astigmatism, anything you do seems like you did it so somebody would see you do it, like showing up at the right parties.
Tom Waits
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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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The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
Tom Waits
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Well, they'll bark you down like carneys, sell you Christmas cards in June.
Tom Waits
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Come down off the cross, we could use the wood.
Tom Waits
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If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back, it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.
Tom Waits
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I don't think that you should be per­fectly candid and frank about the intimate details of your personal life with the public at large. Subsequently, it creates consider­able personal problems.
Tom Waits
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My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
Tom Waits
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The piano has been drinking, not me.
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.
Tom Waits
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Oh I don't mind going to weddings, just as long as it's not my own.
Tom Waits