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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.

Tom Waits

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Tom Waits
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: December 7
Actor
Composer
Guitarist
Jazz Guitarist
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Writer
Pomona
California
Thomas Alan Waits
Ideas
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Reason
Songs
Writing
Creative
Way
Song
Time
Write
Another
Didn
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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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I took a hundred dollars from a blindman's hand.
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The Universe is making music all the time.
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People make songs so that somebody else will hear them and want to do them. I guess it's an indication that the songs aren't so ultra-personal that they can't possibly be interpreted by anyone else.
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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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New York forces you to be in endless surreal situations.
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There's a beauty of show business. It's the only business you can have a career in when you're dead.
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Sometimes the magnetism of a song is impossible to ignore, and it demands that it be sung in a certain way.
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The ship is sinking The ship is sinking There's leak, there's a leak,in the boiler room The poor, the lame, the blind Who ore the ones that we kept in charge Killers, thieves, and lawyers God's Away, God's away God's away on Business
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All medical procedures require two hands, so in a sense it's like when you play an instrument. That's what they call things that they use in their work: They call them instruments. A lot of people start out majoring in medicine and drop it and change their major to music.
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Francis Ford Coppola is completely unconventional. He has a strong sense of loyalty. Great eyes. It's a diabolical undertaking in terms of organization and leadership.
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You have to keep busy. After all, no dog's ever pissed on a moving car.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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Anton brings the camera. I'll bring a tuba, wear black, not shave, and take us to a burned-down Chinese restaurant. (On being photographed by his longtime photo collaborator Anton Corbijn)
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Jesus Christ, this godamn rain, will someone put me on a train.
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I know a girl, she been married so many times, she got rice marks all over her face
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A mental midget with the IQ of a fence post.
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