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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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Tom Waits
Age: 74
Born: 1949
Born: December 7
Actor
Composer
Guitarist
Jazz Guitarist
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Writer
Pomona
California
Thomas Alan Waits
Practical
Unscrew
Game
Mystifying
Games
Spiral
Word
Spirals
Words
Meanings
Find
Practicals
Kind
Appears
Things
Truths

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I took a hundred dollars from a blindman's hand.
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When you say you're doing an opera, it's like when you're a seven-year-old and say, 'I'm off to Washington, Dad.' You kind of go, 'Sure. Sure you are, son.'
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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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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
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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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George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.
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Come down off the cross, we could use the wood.
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I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.
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I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I'm an amateur physician, I guess.
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You cannot really be too concerned with what people think of you. You're on your own adventure of growth and discovery. So it's not always good to be who people think you are, especially if you subscribe to it as well ... which is easily done, because then you don't have to figure out who you are, you just ask somebody else.
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Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning.
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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.
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My first big gig was an opening show for Frank Zappa, and I think that was difficult.
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I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in.
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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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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.
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George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.
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I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music.
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