Quote #30

Apparently the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad - ideally naked and purring on the hood of a new car . I have adamantly and repeatedly refused this dubious honor.

More from Tom Waits

  1. In response to a heckler at his concert at Toronto's Massey Hall in the late 1980's who complained that he could not hear Waits, he replied…
  2. 'When he performs, it sounds as if the world has stopped at 2 A.M.' - Dinah Shore
  3. 'I was born in the back seat of a Yellow Cab in a hospital loading zone and with the meter still running. I emerged needing a shave and sho…
  4. 'I always wondered how Tom Waits would sing 'Greensleeves'....' --Loreena McKennitt, 'The Visit'
  5. 'I like to walk out of a diner with enough gas to open a Mobil station.'
  6. '...like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car'…
  7. 'I don't have fun. Actually, I had fun once. In 1962. I drank a whole bottle of Robitussin cough medicine and went in the back of a 1961 po…
  8. '...like a clown crossed with a cherry bomb.' --Anonymous young girl, liner notes to Used Songs: 1973-1980

All Tom Waits quotes