Tom Waits Quotes

People aren't hearing all the music.

I've often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it's inside a frame.

The world is full of sounds. We just don't usually hear them as music.

The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off.

If you stand too close to a painting - all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail.

Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.

You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.

I love that perhaps we don't see the things that are there because we have no yardstick to see things by, to compare them.

Nothing ever sounds quite the way it does when you're standing right in the middle of it.

I hear music as narrative.

The world is a song, but we do not know whether it is a good song because we have nothing to compare it with.

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

If an apprentice does not hear what a master hears, is then that quality not present in the music? Yes and no. In the world in which the apprentice lives no.

The power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the understanding.

I'm a musician first and sight has never had anything to do with it.

I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down.

It's an interesting education to listen to cricket commentary when you're not at the game. When you're there, which is most of the time for me, it flows over you. But when you're not there, you look at it in a slightly different way. You pick up things.

Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary.

There is music in all things, if men had ears.

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?

The other thing that's useful for me is this notion of the absolute versus the relative:if we walk out and it's a beautiful morning, it's only a beautiful morning because we don't have a broken leg or hemorrhoids or something.

Before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard.

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.

From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses.

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.