Tom Waits Quotes

The title of the movie is open to interpretation.

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.

I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions.

My films are like clouds: their meaning keeps changing every minute.

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

The performances I enjoy are the ones that are hard to read or ambiguous or left-of-centre because it makes you look closer and that's what humans are like - quite mysterious creatures, hard to pinpoint.

I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

Take it in what sense thou wilt.

If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can't ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent.

Who will dare say he has defined art?

What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.

Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. I'd say what any decent poet would say if anyone dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, darling, then it's there!

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

Art is anything you can get away with.

People have to find ways of explaining the work.

In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on.

The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you're at the center of the universe - if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.