Tom Waits
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"Thomas Alan" ""Tom"" "Waits" is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car." With this trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock music styles such as blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music, Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona. He has worked as a composer for movies and musical plays and has acted in supporting roles in films, including Paradise Alley and Bram Stoker's Dracula; he also starred in Jim Jarmusch's 1986 film Down by Law (film)/Down by Law. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his soundtrack work on One from the Heart.

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The piano has been drinking, not me.

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I'm so horny the crack of dawn better watch out.

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Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.

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The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.

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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.

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I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.

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I'm just trying to make a buck like everyone else.

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George Bush is a fan of mine -- he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.

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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, ... While the court can't make me active in radio, I am asking it to make me radioactive to advertisers.

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