Tom Waits Quotes

True life is elsewhere

Some people have a difficult time facing truth and reality. They prefer to live in a make-believe world, pretending that certain things aren't happening.

By binding image and desire, glamour gives us pleasure, even as it heightens our yearning. It leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.

I used to dream of being other places, other people. It was an escape for me.

When I'm playing 'Rock Band,' I'm like, 'Man, someday, later on in life when I'm a famous rock star...' Which gets a little harder to convince myself of as I reach middle age, but it still happens a lot.

People don't want to hear the truth; they never do. They wanna live in some kind of fantasy.

Glamour is an imaginative process that creates a specific emotional response: a sharp mixture of projection, longing, admiration, and aspiration. It evokes an audience's hopes and dreams and makes them seem attainable, all the while maintaining enough distance to sustain the fantasy.

To be honest, Peter Pan was one of those fairy tales that I sort of related to, and I think that's the case with a lot of kids. The whole idea of escapism really resonates with a lot of kids.

I knew there was something special about the theater for me something beyond the regular reality, something that I could get into and transcend and become something other than myself.

I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.

The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.

We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.

'Ernest Borgnine' is sort of my version of Woody Allen's 'Purple Rose Of Cairo' in that it's about the occasional difficulty of coming to terms with the cold hard facts and the temptation to escape into another world - like movies, for example. I'm a pro at escaping.

For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

Dreams, dreams. I walk them; I live them. I delude myself with them. It's a wonder I can spot reality anymore."... He turned from me with a sigh. "I need a drink."... "Oh, good. That'll fix everything. I'm glad in a world gone mad, you've still got your old standbys."... "What do you expect me to do?" he asked. "You could... You could... Well, now that you're here, you could help us. Plus, this guy we're meeting. He's another spirit user."... "Yeah, that's exactly what I want. To help my girlfriend get her old boyfriend back. " He turned away again, and I heard him mutter, "I need two drinks."

I discovered that a lot of the songs I like, they're fantasies, a vision of something, but you don't actually live there.

If I dream I have you, I have you, for all our joys are but fantastical.

I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible. Bad dreams I can cope with. They're just nightmares, and the end eventually. I wake up. The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything is fine. I am still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I'm married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything's wonderful and normal and fine. And then I wake up, and I'm still me. And I'm still here. And that is truly terrible.

The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible.

I think reality is over-rated

You convinced yourselves we're just a bunch of regular lads who got a bad break in life. Anything else would have cracked your dream open and made you face reality. Illusion is easy. Illusion is the loser's way out. Your way.

He created his own Kool Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.

When I was 35 I realized that I was still thinking a lot about what it would be like to go to Narnia. To really go - not just in a daydream, or in a children's book, but what it would actually feel like, physically, psychologically, every other way. The idea was haunting me.

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who want to know the facts, and those who want to make up a nice story to feel better. I wish I was the kind who made up stories.

I like imagination -- and the way I think things could be, had been, or should be -- better than reality.