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
When the weather's rough and it's whiskey in the rain it's best to wrap your savior up in cellophane.
Interpretation
Embracing the chaos of life can be best done with protection and preparation.
This quote by Tom Waits suggests that during difficult or tumultuous times (symbolized by 'rough weather' and 'whiskey in the rain'), one should safeguard what is precious to them ('your savior') using something protective ('cellophane'). It speaks to the necessity of finding ways to endure hardships while still cherishing what matters most in our lives.
In practice
Sharing this quote during a motivational speech about resilience in tough times.
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
The whole history of music has turned out to be something perfect. It's all come around. The music we did with Funkadelic and Parliament was the DNA for hip-hop.
It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.
I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience. That's why I also believe in reincarnation, that we were put here with ideas to pass around.
My work is not about "form follows function," but "form follows beauty" or, even better, "form follows feminine."
Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.
My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it...In writing songs I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie...It's not me, it's the songs. I'm just the postman, I deliver the songs...I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
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