Quotes from Barney Hoskyns

I like things that are kind of falling apart," he admitted to another interviewer. "[Because] I come from a broken home, I guess. I like things that have been ignored or need to be put back together.

We're all holding onto something," Waits said. "None of us wants to come out of the ground." For Waits, "Hold On" was "two people who are in love, writing a song... about being in love".

I do believe in the mysteries of things, about myself and the things I see. I enjoy being puzzled and arriving at my own incorrect conclusions.

I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else's," Waits said on the album's release.

You said this was going to be funny, Jim," Waits barked. "Maybe you better just circle the jokes 'cause I don't see 'em.

Instead he'd "send his songs out there... tell 'em to stick together and look out for their brothers".

So if you go from the hippie thing to more of a Gatsby community, so what? Life is short and you have an opportunity to explore as much of it as fortune and time allow.

I like beautiful melodies telling you terrible things," Waits said of such songs. "Is it my thorny, dark, oozing side, or is it just the way I see the world?

But the truth is that L.A. was never entirely real anyway, as Steely Dan, Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, Larry David and Alan Ball all understood.