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
There’s nothing more embarrassing than a person who tries to guess what the great American public would like, makes a compromise for the first time, and falls flat on his face… I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else’s. That’s a difficult statement to live up to, but then I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of authenticity over seeking approval from others.
Tom Waits expresses the idea that it is better to fail while staying true to oneself than to succeed by compromising one's values for the sake of others' expectations. He suggests that deeply impacting an audience is far more valuable than merely having a large audience, highlighting a philosophy rooted in authenticity and personal integrity.
Themes
AuthenticityFailureSuccessAudienceValues
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about personal integrity, you could use this quote to highlight the importance of staying true to oneself.
More from Tom Waits
All quotes →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.
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 I’d rather die before I wake like Marilyn Monroe and throw my dreams out in the street and the rain make ‘em grow
Tom WaitsRead
Similar quotes
Experience by itself is not science.
Edmund HusserlRead
Economics and a reliance on science and technology to solve our problems has led to an unsustainable situation where continued growth in consumption is required for governments and business to be considered successful. This is a form of insanity. Economics is at the heart of our destructive ways and our faith in it has blinded us
David SuzukiRead
All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the 'perfect' can live content and oblivious.
Haruki MurakamiRead
Who? Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask.
Alan MooreRead
In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Karl MarxRead
The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?
Abraham VergheseRead