I’ve never met anyone who made it with a chick because they owned a Tom Waits album. I’ve got all three, and it’s never helped me.
With families and music, you’re usually looking for something that can make you unique.
I’m not one of those people the tabloids chase around.
The average person spends two weeks over their lifetime waiting for the traffic light to change.
I’m trying to get music ideas that come and keep them alive. It’s like carrying water in your hands. I want to keep it all, and sometimes by the time you get to the studio you have nothing.
The blues and gospel stuff seemed to go together.
And I remember quiet evenings trembling close to you...
I’m so goddamn horny, the crack of dawn better be careful around me!
Everything you can think of is true.
Fishin’ for a good time starts with throwin’ in your line.
There is no such thing as nonfiction.
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.
You don’t meet nice girls in coffee shops.
Never trust a scarecrow wearin’ shades after dark.
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.
Singing is just doing interesting things to the air. Elongating it and twisting it into shapes.
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.
All my friends are dead, or else they’re not feeling too good.
I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.
The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. It cheapens and degrades the human experience, when it should inspire and elevate.
If you’re in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music.