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 like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a desire for authenticity and rawness in music.
Tom Waits highlights the value of experiencing music in its most organic form, suggesting that imperfections and natural elements contribute to the richness and depth of the art. This perspective invites listeners to embrace the genuine qualities of music, rather than seeking a polished or artificial experience.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about the appeal of indie music and its emphasis on raw sound.
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
Well, the way I play, I try not to be a 'repeater pencil', ya dig? Originality's the thing. You can have tone and technique and a lot of other things but without originality you ain't really nowhere. Gotta be original.
A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
I've gradually realised that what I do best is universes. And I shouldn't be afraid of that.
I can't read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.
Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.
The simplicity of photography lies in the fact that it is very easy to make a picture. The staggering complexity of it lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been equally easy.
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