Tom Waits Quotes

I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn't find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.

Your past is just that, the past, a place within your psyche with no more reality to it then the picture of a castle on a postcard is made from stone.

My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.

I love to read. I wish I could advise more people to read. There’s a whole new world in books. If you can’t afford to travel, you travel mentally through reading. You can see anything and go any place you want to in reading.

Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.

Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them

I love working with technology because it allows me to follow my imagination and to invent new things.

NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who learned to read at the age of 5. This changed his life. Owing to the adventure tales he read, he discovered a way to escape from the poor house, the poor country, and the poor reality in which he lived.

One must be an inventor to read well.

Learning through the arts reinforces critical academic skills in reading, language arts and math, and provides students with the skills to creatively solve problems.

The Wright brothers didn't contemplate the staying on the ground of things. Alexander Graham Bell didn't contemplate the noncommunication of things. Thomas Edison didn't contemplate the darkness of things. In order to float an idea into your reality, you must be willing to do a somersault into the unconceivable and land on your feet, contemplating what you want instead of what you don't have.

No employment can be managed without arithmetic, no mechanical invention without geometry.

I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars.

If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.

You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.

When somebody has learned how to program a computer ... You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.

It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.

Geometry enlightens the intellect and sets one's mind right. All of its proofs are very clear and orderly. It is hardly possible for errors to enter into geometrical reasoning, because it is well arranged and orderly. Thus, the mind that constantly applies itself to geometry is not likely to fall into error. In this convenient way, the person who knows geometry acquires intelligence.

Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.

At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

First of all, women inherently, I think, are quite capable of having lots of balls in the air. And so, like, it's all those skills you use; you analyze the problem, figure out your tools, and then go at it piece by piece.... It's like what you have to do in the morning to get your kids out the door [if you're a parent]. The skills are, I believe, the same. The patience issues are the same.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.