Posts filed under: quote
So yeah, it was my sisters birthday today and I decided to draw her a picture of Tom Waits. So I am giving her the drawing and I’m going to frame it and stuff but I am also making a T-shirt out of it, with some text. (This is my blog: thesetelevisionblues)
Q: What’s hard for you?
Tom Waits: Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German.
The problem is that most instruments are square and music is always round.
— Tom Waits, in the book Small Change: A Life of Tom Waits
I always thought songs lived in the air. Figure if you open up a window, they might float in, go in your ear, come out the other ear, and wind up on the radio.
— Tom Waits, Uncut magazine. Dec. 2011, p.49 (via thesetelevisionblues)
[Terry] Gilliam is an impresario, captain, magician, a dictator (a nice one), a genius, and a man you’d want in the boat with you at the end of the world.
— Tom Waits
I’m one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.
— Tom Waits: ‘I look like hell but I’m going to see where it gets me’
“We’ve been working together since Swordfish… I’m the prospector, she’s the cook. She says, “you bring it home, I’ll cook it up.” I think we sharpen each other like knives. She has a fearless imagination. She writes lyrics that are like dreams. And she puts the heart into all things. She’s my true love. There’s no one I trust more with music, or life. And she’s got great rhythm, and finds melodies that are so intriguing and strange. Most of the significant changes I went through musically and as a person began when we met. She’s the person by which I measure all others. She’s who you want with you in a foxhole. She doesn’t like the limelight, but she is an incandescent presence on everything we work on together.”
Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them, sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.
— Tom Waits, 2006
