Top 200 Tom Waits Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Sometimes when you’re making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning.”

— Tom Waits

152. “Photos are profound because they have such short lives. They are more like fingerprints, dead leaves, rain puddles, or the corpses of flies.”

— Tom Waits

153. “Misery is the River of the World.”

— Tom Waits

154. “I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I’m an amateur physician, I guess.”

— Tom Waits

155. “Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you’re mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.”

— Tom Waits

156. “Oh, I’m not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.”

— Tom Waits

157. “My first big gig was an opening show for Frank Zappa, and I think that was difficult.”

— Tom Waits

158. “Popular music is like a big party, and it’s a thrill sneaking in rather than being invited. Every once in a while, a guy with his shirt on inside out, wearing lipstick and a pillbox hat gets a chance to speak.”

— Tom Waits

159. “You’ve gotta have somebody to trust, that knows a lot.”

— Tom Waits

160. “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.”

— Tom Waits

161. “People make songs so that somebody else will hear them and want to do them. I guess it’s an indication that the songs aren’t so ultra-personal that they can’t possibly be interpreted by anyone else.”

— Tom Waits

162. “Well you say that it’s gospel, But I know that it’s only church.”

— Tom Waits

163. “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.”

— Tom Waits

164. “Got 27 children I never see.”

— Tom Waits

165. “I do some acting. And there’s a difference between “I do some acting” and “I’m an actor.””

— Tom Waits

166. “I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that’s all there was on the jukebox.”

— Tom Waits

167. “I like vocal word stuff. But I don’t always write with an instrument, I usually write a capella. It’s more like drawing in the air with your fingers. It’s closest to the choreography of a bee. You’re freer.”

— Tom Waits

168. “You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty. I don’t want to live any other way.”

— Tom Waits

169. “Jesus Christ, this godamn rain, will someone put me on a train.”

— Tom Waits

170. “I like Thelonious Monk, he’s so gnarled, he’s like a piece of machinery that’s pulled up the bolts on the floor and gone off on its own.”

— Tom Waits

171. “I’m usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page.”

— Tom Waits

172. “With families and music, you’re usually looking for something that can make you unique.”

— Tom Waits

173. “You know, we just buy music now. We don’t make it any more. And that goes for just about everything. I think it’s so important that people develop and subscribe to and have confidence in their own ability to make music, however rough it is.”

— Tom Waits

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

— Tom Waits

175. “Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don’t get out much. It’s true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.”

— Tom Waits

176. “People get frightened that success is going to take them out of life. They’re no longer going to be on the corner of Bedlam and Squalor; life will only be something you can get through the mail.”

— Tom Waits

177. “It’s terrible for the culture of music. Like anything that is purely economic, it ignores the most important component.”

— Tom Waits

178. “You hope people are going to be listening to you after you’re gone. And they like you better after you’re gone.”

— Tom Waits

179. “I don’t know what the ‘big time’ is.”

— Tom Waits

180. “I really like your playing.”

— Tom Waits

181. “Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting.”

— Tom Waits

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

— Tom Waits

183. “Jimmy Stewart said he stopped making movies because he didn’t like the way he looked on screen anymore. I’m more the guy who says I look like hell but I’m going to see where it gets me.”

— Tom Waits

184. “George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.”

— Tom Waits

185. “I took a hundred dollars from a blindman’s hand.”

— Tom Waits

186. “I’m not one of those people the tabloids chase around.”

— Tom Waits

187. “Don’t look back, because someone might be gaining on you.”

— Tom Waits

188. “You want soldiers who, when they get to a river after a long march, don’t start rooting for their canteen in their pack, but just dive right in.”

— Tom Waits

189. “Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.”

— Tom Waits

190. “I didn’t really want to be part of a clique or a niche. But I also was looking for my own voice, as a writer, y’know? And a world I could call my own.”

— Tom Waits

191. “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.”

— Tom Waits

192. “I like writing melody without an instrument. It’s just so – it’s more like the choreography of a bee; you just go.”

— Tom Waits

193. “It’s rather mystifying when you think about writing songs – where they come from, and how they’re born.”

— Tom Waits

194. “I think some bands thrive on the idea of changing instruments. When they’re off their real instrument, the ability to go very far from the original idea is reduced.”

— Tom Waits

195. “George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.”

— Tom Waits

196. “I finally discovered that my life is more important than show business.”

— Tom Waits

197. “You don’t meet nice girls in coffee shops.”

— Tom Waits

198. “All my friends are dead, or else they’re not feeling too good.”

— Tom Waits

199. “There ain’t no such thing as the devil that’s just god when he’s drunk.”

— Tom Waits

200. “And I remember quiet evenings trembling close to you...”

— Tom Waits