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
Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the interdependence of reality and imagination in life.
In this quote, Tom Waits highlights the essential connection between reality and imagination, suggesting that each complements and enhances the other. Reality serves as the grounding force for imagination, providing a solid foundation, while imagination is vital for enriching our experience of reality, allowing us to navigate and understand our world more creatively and insightfully.
In practice
In an inspirational speech about creativity at a conference.
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.
If 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.
I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.
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.
My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
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
War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.
Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.
We do not celebrate the death of our enemies.
What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. . . . . All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection.
I was asked why I did not give a rod with which to fish, in the hands of the poor, rather than give the fish itself as this makes them remain poor. So I told them: The people whom we pick up are not able to stand with a rod. So today I will give them fish and when they are able to stand, then I shall send them to you and you can give them the rod. That is your job. Let me do my work today.
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