Tom Waits Quotes

I'm always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you're drowning, and it's there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.

The way we look at it, everything is a sound.

Hearing is a form of touch. I could hear less through the ears but more through the body.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

I don't even know what sound is, much less what it's for. It isn't to make money that's for sure. I've never made any.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

The meaning of the words in my songs are very important to me. But what's most important to me is that the music works.

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.

People aren't hearing all the music.

I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I'm not interested in what things look like.

I'm always doubting because I've been told so much that, you're not the right look or you're not the right sound, and, you know, whether I do jazz or R&B there are always complaints.

We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.

I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell. If it doesn't turn out that way, I add more reds and other colors until I get it.

When I am willing, all sound is available to me.

This industry's so full of distractions: partying, drinking, sex, money. The priority for me is just to make music that people can connect with. I want to make something fresh that people may not understand

Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.

The sound is very much always in my head, I have to get the sound out of my head onto the recording.

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

You know when I shoot with digital capture, I look for the mistake. When I shoot with film I embrace it.

All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, 'Look at it, listen to it.' Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

We are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds organized by another human being: music.

I'll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I'd never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I'd never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn't much like it at first.

My staged work looks so real that people actually take it for documentary. But, in fact, that is my intention, to disguise the manufacturedness of it. Half of my work, or probably more than that, is staged.

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.