Tom Waits

“I don't really like listening to the radio so much.”

“I saw a crow building a nest, I was watching him very carefully, I was kind of stalking him and he was aware of it. And you know what they do when they become aware of someone stalking them when they build a nest, which is a very vulnerable place to be? They build a decoy nest. It's just for you.”

“I look for things that are left of center, something you've only seen your whole life, but never heard. Hit it! With a stick! I have a guitar made out of a 2x4 that I bought in Cleveland.”

“My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.”

“He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.”

“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.”

“When you're a kid and you're trying to find your own voice, it's rather daunting to hear somebody like Howlin' Wolf, because you know that you'll never achieve that.”

“All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.”

“a foreign affair juxtaposed with a statesideand domestically approved romantic fancy is mysteriously attractive due to circumstances knowing it will only be parlayed into a memory”

“But then 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.”

“Sometimes the magnetism of a song is impossible to ignore, and it demands that it be sung in a certain way.”

“Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.”

“If you are recording, you are recording. I don't believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal.”

“I'm just trying to make a buck like everyone else.”

“The Universe is making music all the time.”

“I have an audio stigmatism whereby I hear things wrong - I have audio illusions.”

“I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.”

“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.”

“I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have.”

“Sometimes words are just music themselves. Like 'Chicago' is a very musical sounding name.”