Tom Waits Quotes

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

I was never tomboyish. I loved Barbies. It's just the way I grew up.

I was the youngest of three kids, and from the age of four, singing was my way of getting attention.

Even as a child, I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want to wear red lipstick.

I'm very sensitive. Because my mum was my primary emotional caregiver growing up, I found myself being pinned into dresses, darting her dresses, choosing her high heels for the evening or what to wear. I'm very much a mommy's boy.

I grew up in Omaha and Milwaukee, and was always a very inquisitive kid.

I started writing when I was 9. My mother told me it was before that, but that was the first I remember.

I think growing up, the assimilation of most cultural conventions typically encouraged by a heightened awareness of gender and sex encourages a sort of separation of the self. What's so special about 'Hanna' is that her upbringing has negated this indoctrination; she's almost absolved of the pressures of gender or gender itself.

It's my real name. My mother's name is Rose Rock. It was the worst name as a kid to have. They called me Piece of the Rock, Plymouth Rock, Joe Rockid, and Flintstones. Now they call me Mister Rock.

It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.

We think we need to create ourselves, always doing a paste-up job on our personalities. That is because we're trying to be special rather than real. We're pathetically trying to conform with all the other people trying to do the same.

It's important for us to tell our stories.

I needed to talk about my real personal history, in order to become free of it.

A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one’s personal history and that of one’s friends, interwoven with one’s tastes, preferences and character and constitutes a sort of unwritten autobiography.

I love black thighs, you sisters better realize That real hair and real eyes get real guys. So before you makeup your face, you better make up your mind.

I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead

My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.

I guess some people like to just stick with their sound, like Weezer or something, but I think I just try to keep it as close to my real life, in a Neil Young sort of way, as possible.

You're not here just to be a clone. You're not here to be a copy. We have enough of those. You don't have to apply. You don't even have to go there to be absolutely yourself - real, here, now, on this planet.

So perhaps the real secret to style is filling yourself to the absolute brim with engagement. Loving not wisely, but too well and all that.

Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained.

The society wants you to have beautiful personalities; the society wants you to have personalities which are comfortable for the society, convenient for the society. But the person is not the real thing, the individual is the real thing. The individual is not necessarily always comfortable to the society - in fact he is very inconvenient.

When I was producing the first solo album, i just wanted to convey some messages through it. The message was 'no blood will come out even if I am pinned' However, after trying out different kinds of music activities, I started to change and wanted to convey my real emotion that I have in my everyday life. I want to express the feelings that everyone has felt at least once, in music so I think people will feel/understand my songs.

Hair is vitally personal to children. They weep vigorously when it is cut for the first time; no matter how it grows, bushy, straight or curly, they feel they are being shorn of a part of their personality.

To a certain extent everybody has a certain sort of way of being a persona that they learn how to be when they're really little. They figure out that if they're really funny, or really pretty, or if they work really, really hard or are really smart, then that's what's going to get them by. That is what is going to make people like them.