01c. 1969 ADMy kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.Tom Waits / quote ↗
02c. 1969 ADThe world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.Tom Waits / quote ↗
03c. 1969 ADHe likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.Tom Waits / quote ↗
08c. 1969 ADa foreign affair juxtaposed with a statesideand domestically approved romantic fancy is mysteriously attractive due to circumstances knowing it will only be parlayed into a memoryTom Waits / quote ↗
09c. 1969 ADChildren 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 / quote ↗
10c. 1969 ADI’ve always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used… I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around… this is an interesting one, it’s amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something.Tom Waits / quote ↗
12c. 1969 ADI made a wish on a sliver of moonlightA sly grin and a bowl full of starsTom Waits / quote ↗
14c. 1969 ADYou must have brought the bad weather with youThe sky's the color of leadAll you've left me is a featherOn an unmade bedTom Waits / quote ↗
17c. 1969 ADWhen the weather's rough and it's whiskey in the rain it's best to wrap your savior up in cellophane.Tom Waits / quote ↗
19c. 1969 ADNew 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 / quote ↗
20c. 1969 ADYou hope people are going to be listening to you after you're gone. And they like you better after you're gone.Tom Waits / quote ↗
21c. 1969 ADAs 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 / quote ↗
22c. 1969 ADWe are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.Tom Waits / quote ↗
23c. 1969 ADMost 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 / quote ↗
