My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.
-- Tom Waits
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.
-- Tom Waits
If you get far enough away you'll be on your way back home.
-- Tom Waits
Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk.
-- Tom Waits
If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man.
-- Tom Waits
Come down off the cross, we can use the wood.
-- Tom Waits
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