Famous Quotes & Sayings

Tom Waits

Well you wave your hand and they scatter like crows They have nothing that will ever capture your heart They're just thorns without the rose Be careful of them in the dark Oh, if I was the one you chose to be your only one Oh baby can't you hear me now, can't you hear me now Will I see you tonight on a downtown train Every night it's just the same, you leave me lonely now

Tom Waits

Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you're mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.

Tom Waits

Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don't care if they lose it; they'll just make another one.

Tom Waits

Sometimes the magnetism of a song is impossible to ignore, and it demands that it be sung in a certain way.

Tom Waits

Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing with the air.

Tom Waits

I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.

Tom Waits

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

Tom Waits

Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.

Tom Waits

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.

Tom Waits

If you can make a little painting for the ears with a few words, well, I like words: I like cutting them up and finding different ways of saying the same thing. I get into a spell, and it all comes easy. I don't labor over it. I go inside the song. I think you make yourself an antenna for songs, and songs want to be around you. And then they bring other songs along, and then they're all sittin' around, and they're drinking your beer, and they're sleeping on the floor. And they are using the phone. They're rude, thankless little f-ers.

Tom Waits

I don't like hearing Beatles songs in commercials. It almost renders them useless. I think, 'Oh God, another one bites the dust.'

Tom Waits

I always thought songs are movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.

Steven Erikson

He was a man who would never ask for sympathy. He was a man who sought only to do what was right. Such people appear in the world, every world, now and then, like a single refrain of some blessed song, a fragment caught on the spur of an otherwise raging cacophony. Imagine a world without such souls. Yes, it should have been harder to do.

Steve Miller

You're the cutest thing that I ever did see I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree

Steve Martin

As much as I remember, I just thought, I want to sing a song that starts normal and ends crazy.

Steve Martin

I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it's hard to get them out on the air.

Steve Martin

In my banjo show with the Steep Canyon Rangers, I do do comedy during that show. It'd be absurd just to stand there mute and play 25 banjo songs.

Steve Martin

I would get records by Earl Scruggs... I would tune my banjo down and I'd pick out the songs note by note. Learned how to play that way. I persevered. There was a book written by Pete Seeger, who showed you some basic strumming and some basic picking... And I kind of worked out my own style of playing.

Steve Martin

I don't think comic timing is the same as music timing, but I definitely find that I've learned from just writing in general that songs can be narrative without having a story.

Stephan Jenkins

There are songs I really enjoy playing. I like playing "Say It" live because it's a long jam, kind of like shoegaze, so I do enjoy that.

Stephan Jenkins

Sometimes something will come along, and it feels easy and sometimes you'll get 85 percent there on a song and the last 15 percent will elude you for three years.

Stephan Jenkins

I respect Chris Carrabba as a songwriter and I also respect his past. He's got this fierce, straight edge, kind of hardcore core. There's so many songs that people are connected to and they all came together in a kind of DIY way, which I really do respect.

Stephan Jenkins

I see rock music as the best example of modernday storytelling that exists in our society. Songs are narratives that help the listeners cope with the reality of life that can't be easily spoken about in everyday conversation. It is a hugely powerful process of helping people find themselves through music.

Stanley Clarke

After all my years of doing instrumental music I still like just a simple instrumental song with a nice catchy melody and an opportunity to play a solo over a harmonic structure.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

You cannot play the Song of Freedom on an instrument of oppression.

Simon Cowell

Music should always be polarizing. What one person likes, somebody else hates. And I hate that kind of snobbery in pop music. The fact that so many people are getting upset over this one song is hysterical. And if people like it, that's great.

Simon Cowell

You sounded like someone who should be singing on a cruise ship. Halfway through your song, I wished the ship was sinking.

Simon Cowell

I like to know why a video has suddenly gone viral, why a song has broken, why a TV show is suddenly rating out of pattern... I'm pretty good at understanding why things are becoming popular.

Simon Cowell

They understand what their market is and who they should be selling records to, and most importantly, they know the kind of artist that they want to be, but they have to do it themselves. You don't want a 13-year-old singing some awful song from a musical.

Shirley Knight

There's a great difference between being popular and being an artist.

Shirley Manson

You don't really hear a female perspective on the radio, because so many of the songs are being written by men.

Shirley Manson

If Jennifer Lopez could write songs like Fiona Apple's, she wouldn't have to spend so many hours at the gym.

Shirley MacLaine

I could be whatever I wanted to be if I trusted that music, that song, that vibration of God that was inside of me.