Tom Waits

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

New York, of course, is to be in endless surreal situations where a fifty-thousand dollar, gun-metal Mercedez pulls up into a puddle of blood, and out steps a twenty-five karat blonde transvestite with a two dollar wristwatch.

You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.

When the weather's rough and it's whiskey in the rain it's best to wrap your savior up in cellophane.

I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.

Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.

You must have brought the bad weather with youThe sky's the color of leadAll you've left me is a featherOn an unmade bed

Well, it's either kiss me or kill me, that's how I see it.

I made a wish on a sliver of moonlightA sly grin and a bowl full of stars

And I remember quiet evenings trembling close to you...