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
What this quote means
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.
Themes
ImaginationRealityInterdependenceCreativityLife
In practice
Example use cases
In an inspirational speech about creativity at a conference.
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
I wonder if people who asked for God to intervene in our world, really know what they are asking. Will they want to be there when God really does intervene?
C. S. LewisRead
This attitude [the abstract method in mathematics] can be encapsulated in the following slogan: a mathematical object is what it does.
Timothy GowersRead
To show our simple skill, That is the true beginning of our end.
William ShakespeareRead
...the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.
Karl MarxRead
There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.
Anais NinRead
I think a person has to believe in something,_x000D_ or search out some kind of faith;_x000D_ otherwise life is empty, nothing._x000D_ How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly,_x000D_ why children are born, why there are stars in the sky..._x000D_ Either you know why you live,_x000D_ or it's all small, unnecessary bits.
Sarah RuhlRead