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
Got a head full of lightning, a hat full of rain.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects a sense of creativity and emotional complexity.
Tom Waits' quote 'Got a head full of lightning, a hat full of rain' conveys the idea of having a tumultuous but vibrant mind filled with inspiration ('lightning') and emotional experiences or burdens ('rain'). It suggests that great creativity often comes from a mix of electrifying ideas and the weight of life's challenges, encapsulating the duality of artistic expression.
Themes
CreativityEmotionsArtInspirationComplexity
In practice
Example use cases
During a poetry reading, to emphasize the beauty and struggle of being an artist.
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.
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I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.
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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.
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My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
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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
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Similar quotes
I just like art. I get pure pleasure from it. I have a lot of wonderful paintings, and every time I look at them I see something different.
Jack NicholsonRead
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
Elizabeth BowenRead
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass, And how delightful when a fall of snow Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so As to make chair and bed exactly stand Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
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My weakness ... is architecture. I think of my work as ephemeral architecture, dedicated to the beauty of the female body.
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All fiction comes from a little bit of reality, otherwise it would have no relevance. The fun is in innovation, take something real like this fair, and make it something larger than life.
Garrison KeillorRead