"My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.“

-Tom Waits

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Tom Waits quote about imagination: "My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind m..."

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"Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago."

-Tom Waits

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"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

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"You hope people are going to be listening to you after you're gone. And they like you better after you're gone."

-Tom Waits

"Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream."

-Tom Waits

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"But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music."

-Tom Waits

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"As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time."

-Tom Waits

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"Television contracts the imagination and radio expands it."

-Terry Wogan

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"Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind it is a way of engaging reality."

-Irving Howe

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"Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them."

-Laurette Taylor

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"With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour."

-Theodore Gericault

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"Anyone who lives within his means suffers from a lack of imagination."

-Lionel Stander

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"One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one's horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning?"

-Francis Cabot Lowell

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