Top 200 Tom Waits Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Tom Waits

102. “I’ve seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train...”

— Tom Waits

103. “I’m always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you’re drowning, and it’s there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.”

— Tom Waits

104. “I don’t go to church on Sunday, don’t get on my knees to pray, or memorize the books of the Bible, I got my own special way.”

— Tom Waits

105. “Cross my wooden leg, swear on my glass eye.”

— Tom Waits

106. “Don’t plant your days they turn into weeds.”

— Tom Waits

107. “I can’t listen to so much music at the same time. I think you really have to have a diet. You’re just processing too much, there’s no place to put it. If you go a long time without hearing music, then you hear music that nobody else hears.”

— Tom Waits

108. “Planes and Trains and Boats and Busses Characteristically Evolve a common attitude of blue Unless you have a suitcase and a ticket and a passport And the cargo that they’re carrying is you.”

— Tom Waits

109. “Well, they’ll bark you down like carneys, sell you Christmas cards in June.”

— Tom Waits

110. “You just write and you don’t try to make sense of it. You just put it down the way you got it.”

— Tom Waits

111. “They called it the Terminal Bar but they had no idea that like twenty years later the place’d be filling up with terminal cases.”

— Tom Waits

112. “And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget that history puts a saint in every dream.”

— Tom Waits

113. “Are you still jumping out of windows in expensive clothes?”

— Tom Waits

114. “When the weather’s rough and it’s whiskey in the rain it’s best to wrap your savior up in cellophane.”

— Tom Waits

115. “Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.”

— Tom Waits

116. “I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We’re all looking at the wrapping. But we won’t tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath.”

— Tom Waits

117. “The average person spends two weeks over their lifetime waiting for the traffic light to change.”

— Tom Waits

118. “It’s new, it’s improved, it’s old fashioned.”

— Tom Waits

119. “I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.”

— Tom Waits

120. “The trick is to have a career and have a family. It’s like having two dogs that hate each other and you have to take them for a walk every night.”

— Tom Waits

121. “She pulls a razor from her boot and a thousand victims fall around her feet.”

— Tom Waits

122. “Folks who work here are professors. Don’t replace all the knowers with guessors keep’em open they’re the ears of the town.”

— Tom Waits

123. “If I exorcise my devils, all my angels may go, too.”

— Tom Waits

124. “Oh, I got a beautiful 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille four-door. No one will ride in it with me.”

— Tom Waits

125. “You know when you throw a party, you think people will show up and no one will like each other. It’s like that with music – parts of your musical psyche have never met other parts. You wonder if you should get them together.”

— Tom Waits

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

— Tom Waits

127. “As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time.”

— Tom Waits

128. “New York forces you to be in endless surreal situations.”

— Tom Waits

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

— Tom Waits

130. “Any place is good for eavesdropping, if you know how to eavesdrop.”

— Tom Waits

131. “There’s nothing that makes me laugh more than being in the situation where you’re not supposed to laugh. Funerals. People crying. Breaking down. Telling you their life. I’m the worst. I’m the worst at that.”

— Tom Waits

132. “What you want is for music to love you back. That’s why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it.”

— Tom Waits

133. “I hate Disneyland. It primes our kids for Las Vegas.”

— Tom Waits

134. “If you’re a writer, you know that the stories don’t come to you – you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that’s where the stories were.”

— Tom Waits

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

— Tom Waits

136. “Presley’s what I go by, why don’t you change the station.”

— Tom Waits

137. “There’s only one reason why you write new songs: You get sick of the old songs. It’s not that I didn’t do anything during the time when I wrote no songs. I was creative, but in another way. I had ideas for songs and collected the ideas.”

— Tom Waits

138. “It’s the same with men as with horses and dogs, nothing wants to die.”

— Tom Waits

139. “Any image I have, it’s just what I do, but it comes off as being very pretentious. When you’re a bit in the public astigmatism, anything you do seems like you did it so somebody would see you do it, like showing up at the right parties.”

— Tom Waits

140. “You know what I really love? The CD players in a car. How when you put the CD right up by the slot, it actually takes it out of your hand, like it’s hungry. It pulls it in, and you feel like it wants more silver discs.”

— Tom Waits

141. “Disneyland is Vegas for children.”

— Tom Waits

142. “I don’t know if any genuine, meaningful change could ever result from a song. It’s kind of like throwing peanuts at a gorilla.”

— Tom Waits

143. “When it’s raining you can’t find enough things to catch it in. When it’s not you can stand out in the middle of the street in a dress and a funny hat and nothing’s gonna make it rain. I go through periods – or spells – when I’m more receptive.”

— Tom Waits

144. “When you say you’re doing an opera, it’s like when you’re a seven-year-old and say, ‘I’m off to Washington, Dad.’ You kind of go, ‘Sure. Sure you are, son.’”

— Tom Waits

145. “Arithmetic arithmetock Turn the hands back on the clock How does the ocean rock the boat? How did the razor find my throat? The only strings that hold me here Are tangled up around the pier.”

— Tom Waits

146. “I was always laughing in church.”

— Tom Waits

147. “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.”

— Tom Waits

148. “I may be drunk but at least I’m not insane.”

— Tom Waits

149. “You choke my days, I’ll choke yours.”

— Tom Waits

150. “There’s a place on my arm where I’ve written her name next to mine.”

— Tom Waits