When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
Tom WaitsRead
I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Tom Waits highlights his love for jazz despite not being an accomplished musician, indicating that he values words as his primary means of expression.
In this quote, Tom Waits expresses his deep admiration for jazz music while humbly acknowledging his limitations as a musician. He suggests that while he may not excel at playing musical instruments, he finds strength and creativity in language, implying that vocabulary is his true instrument. This reflects a broader idea about the different ways individuals can express themselves artistically, whether through music or words.
Themes
JazzMusicVocabularyExpressionArt
In practice
Example use cases
In a creative writing workshop to inspire participants about the power of words.
More from Tom Waits
All quotes βIf you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.
Tom WaitsRead
I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.
Tom WaitsRead
Don't plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me - choke those little bad days. Choke 'em down to nothing.
Tom WaitsRead
My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
Tom WaitsRead
Now its raining its pouring the old man is snoring now I lay me down to sleep I hear the sirens in the street all my dreams are made of chrome I have no way to get back home Iβd rather die before I wake like Marilyn Monroe and throw my dreams out in the street and the rain make βem grow
Tom WaitsRead
Similar quotes
If you love writing or making music or blogging or any sort of performing art, then do it. Do it with everything you've got. Just don't plan on using it as a shortcut to making a living.
Seth GodinRead
I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him.
Stan LeeRead
Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.
Arnold BennettRead
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Mark TwainRead
If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.
Lawrence BlockRead
To hell with facts! We need stories.
Ken KeseyRead