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Quotes by Tom Waits

Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.
– Tom Waits
Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.
– Tom Waits
I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.
– Tom Waits
The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.
– Tom Waits
The piano has been drinking, not me.
– Tom Waits
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.
– Tom Waits
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
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
Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.
– Tom Waits
My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
– Tom Waits
Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.
– Tom Waits
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
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