Top 200 Tom Waits Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Time is just memory Mixed in with Desire.”

— Tom Waits

52. “Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.”

— Tom Waits

53. “On my gravestone, I want it to say, “I told you I was sick.””

— Tom Waits

54. “I sold a quart of blood and bought a half a pint of scotch.”

— Tom Waits

55. “The fact is most of the things that people know about me are made up. My own life is backstage. So what you “know” about me is only what I allowed you to know about me.”

— Tom Waits

56. “You got to tell me the brave captain Why are the wicked so strong? How do the angels get to sleep When the devil leaves the porch light on?”

— Tom Waits

57. “Words are music, really.”

— Tom Waits

58. “We are buried beneath the weight of information...”

— Tom Waits

59. “I put food on the table and roof overhead. But I’d trade it all tomorrow for the highway instead.”

— Tom Waits

60. “He said, I’m better off without her, until I showed him my tattoo.”

— Tom Waits

61. “Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you’re dead.”

— Tom Waits

62. “They say that I have no hits and that I’m difficult to work with. And they say that like it’s a bad thing.”

— Tom Waits

63. “I don’t like hearing Beatles songs in commercials. It almost renders them useless. I think, ‘Oh God, another one bites the dust.’”

— Tom Waits

64. “We have a deficit of wonder right now.”

— Tom Waits

65. “Now its raining its pouring the old man is snoring now I lay me down to sleep I hear the sirens in the street all my dreams are made of chrome I have no way to get back home I’d rather die before I wake like Marilyn Monroe and throw my dreams out in the street and the rain make ’em grow.”

— Tom Waits

66. “You can drive out nature with a pitch fork But it always comes roaring back again.”

— Tom Waits

67. “I’ll take a rusty nail and scratch your initials on my arm.”

— Tom Waits

68. “I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I’m a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.”

— Tom Waits

69. “I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in.”

— Tom Waits

70. “I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.”

— Tom Waits

71. “I always thought songs are movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.”

— Tom Waits

72. “Not the kind of wheel you fall asleep at.”

— Tom Waits

73. “Most songs that aren’t jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs.”

— Tom Waits

74. “Oh I don’t mind going to weddings, just as long as it’s not my own...”

— Tom Waits

75. “For a songwriter, you don’t really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they’re made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.”

— Tom Waits

76. “I did my time in the jail of your arms.”

— Tom Waits

77. “I’m reliable sources, I’ll tell ya anything you want me to know.”

— Tom Waits

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

— Tom Waits

79. “There’s a beauty of show business. It’s the only business you can have a career in when you’re dead.”

— Tom Waits

80. “I’ve been riding on the crest of a slump lately.”

— Tom Waits

81. “I walked 500 miles just to see a halo, when I opened my eyes I was blind as can be.”

— Tom Waits

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

— Tom Waits

83. “The blues and gospel stuff seemed to go together.”

— Tom Waits

84. “There’s truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That’s what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.”

— Tom Waits

85. “The Music was like Electric Sugar.”

— Tom Waits

86. “I hope I’m becoming more eccentric. More room in the brain.”

— Tom Waits

87. “Most changes in music, most exciting things that happen in music, occur through a miscommunication between people “I thought you said this.” Poetry comes out of that too.”

— Tom Waits

88. “I was born in the back seat of a Yellow Cab in a hospital loading zone and with the meter still running. I emerged needing a shave and shouted ‘Time Square, and step on it!’”

— Tom Waits

89. “It’s cold out there, colder than a ticket taker’s smile at the Ivar Theatre on a Saturday night.”

— Tom Waits

90. “I know a girl, she been married so many times, she got rice marks all over her face.”

— Tom Waits

91. “Did the devil make the world while God was sleeping?”

— Tom Waits

92. “The moon was sharp enough to draw blood from a stone.”

— Tom Waits

93. “I admit that I ain’t no angel, I admit that I ain’t no saint – I’m selfish and I’m cruel and I’m blind. If I exorcise my devils, well my angels may leave too. When they leave they’re so hard to find...”

— Tom Waits

94. “It’s a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.”

— Tom Waits

95. “I’m not fighting for justice. I am not fighting for freedom. I am fighting for my life and another day in the world here.”

— Tom Waits

96. “Some men are searching for the Holy Grail, but there ain’t nothing sweeter than riding the rail. Pregnant women and Vietnam vets, beggin on the freeway, bout as hard as it gets.”

— Tom Waits

97. “Got a head full of lightning, a hat full of rain.”

— Tom Waits

98. “My wife called me a mule. She once said, “I didn’t marry a man; I married a mule!” I kept thinking about it. It was in the back of my head. I think it makes a good title for an album.”

— Tom Waits

99. “I’m so goddamn horny, the crack of dawn better be careful around me!”

— Tom Waits

100. “My friends think I’m ugly, I gotta masculine face.”

— Tom Waits