Barney Hoskyns > Quotes

“I like things that are kind of falling apart," he admitted to another interviewer. "[Because] I come from a broken home, I guess. I like things that have been ignored or need to be put back together.”
― Barney Hoskyns, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits

“You can't really be too concerned with what people think of you. You're on your own adventure of growth and discovery. Like Charles Bukowski said, 'People think I'm down on Fifth and Main at the Blarney Stone, but really I'm on top floor of the health club with a towel in my lap, watching Johnny Carson.' So it's not always good to be where people think you are, especially if you subscribe to it as well ... which is easily done, because then you don't have to figure out who you are, you just ask somebody else.”
― Barney Hoskyns, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits

“Ultimate Spinach”
― Barney Hoskyns, Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion

“I do believe in the mysteries of things, about myself and the things I see. I enjoy being puzzled and arriving at my own incorrect conclusions.”
― Barney Hoskyns, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits

“I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else's," Waits said on the album's release.”
― Barney Hoskyns, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits

“I like beautiful melodies telling you terrible things," Waits said of such songs. "Is it my thorny, dark, oozing side, or is it just the way I see the world?”
― Barney Hoskyns

“So if you go from the hippie thing to more of a Gatsby community, so what? Life is short and you have an opportunity to explore as much of it as fortune and time allow.”
― Barney Hoskyns, Hotel California: The True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends

“Like his cohort”
― Barney Hoskyns, Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion

“Instead he’d “send his songs out there... tell ‘em to stick together and look out for their brothers”.”
― Barney Hoskyns, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits

“You said this was going to be funny, Jim," Waits barked. "Maybe you better just circle the jokes 'cause I don't see 'em.”
― Barney Hoskyns, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits

“We’re all holding onto something,” Waits said. “None of us wants to come out of the ground.” For Waits, “Hold On” was “two people who are in love, writing a song... about being in love”.”
― Barney Hoskyns, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits

“I think musicians in general are childish – in all the best and worst possible senses of that term.”
― Barney Hoskyns, Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion

“I'm not a politician," he told me. "I keep my mouth shut because I don't want to put my foot in it. But at a certain point, saying absolutely nothing is a political statement all of its own.”
― Barney Hoskyns, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits