Quotes from Tom Waits

Fishin' for a good time starts with throwin' in your line.

Everything you can think of is true.

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things

El Diablo hizo el mundo mientras Dios estaba durmiendo.

Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now.

George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.

You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops.

There is no such thing as nonfiction.

Misery's the river of the world. Everybody row!

New York, of course, is to be in endless surreal situations where a fifty-thousand dollar, gun-metal Mercedez pulls up into a puddle of blood, and out steps a twenty-five karat blonde transvestite with a two dollar wristwatch.

Singing is just doing interesting things to the air. Elongating it and twisting it into shapes.

You know, people only travel really with their seeds, and with their songs. In Bosnia they interviewed a lot of refugees... they'd left with nothing and they asked them what they had, and they had seeds in their pockets from their gardens and their songs. That was it. Once you're nourished in that most fundamental way, everything else follows.

I'm the type of guy who'd sell you a rat's asshole for a wedding ring.

Never trust a scarecrow wearin' shades after dark.

The studio is torn down, all the people who played on it are dead, the instruments have been sold off. But you are listening to a moment that happened in time sixty years ago and you are hearing it just as sharp as when it was made. That remains an amazing thing to me.

an all time favorite: "The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.

there ain't no devil, it's just God when he's drunk.

Picture in a frame

Let me fall out of a window with confetti in my hair deal out jacks or better on a blanket by the stairs I'll tell you all my secrets but I'll lie about my past and send me off to bed forevermore

Songs are really just interesting things to be doing with the air

I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

I don't know what 'the big time' is really, except that it's probably some terrible place you can't get out of, you know… or you fall from it and break all your bones, or you try to go further and burn up.

There ain't no devil, just God when he's drunk.

All my friends are dead, or else they're not feeling too good.