Tom Waits interviews Tom Waits

read this, it´s really good. you will love the bit about portugal, very funny (if your portuguese!)

gordonshumway:

Q: What’s wrong with the world?
A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley’s dog made $12 million last year… and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio, made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.

Q: Do you have words to live by?
A: Jim Jarmusch once told me, “Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and cheap, it won’t be good. If it’s cheap and good, it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good, it won’t be cheap.” Fast, cheap and good… pick (2) words to live by.

Q: What is on Hemingway’s gravestone?
A: “Pardon me for not getting up.”

Q: Now Tom, for the grand prize… who said, “He’s the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of”?
A: Mae West

Q: Who said, “Half the people in America are just faking it”?
A: Robert Mitchum (who actually died in his sleep). I think he was being generous and kind when he said that.

Q What remarkable things have you found in unexpected places?
A:
1. Real beauty: oil stains left by cars in a parking lot.
2. Shoeshine stand that looked like thrones in Brazil made of scrap wood.
3. False teeth in pawnshop windows in Reno, Nevada.
4. Great acoustics: in jail.
5. Best food: Airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
6. Most gift shops: Fatima, Portugal.
8. Most unlikely location for a Chicano crowd: A Morrissey concert.
9. Most poverty: Washington, D.C.
10 A homeless man with a beautiful operatic voice singing the word “Bacteria” in an empty dumpster in Chinatown.
11. A Chinese man with a Texas accent in Scotland.
12. Best nights sleep: in a dry riverbed in Arizona.
13. Most people who wear red pants: St. Louis.
14. Most beautiful horses: New York City.
15. A judge in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1890 presided over a trial where a man who was accused of murder and was guilty — convicted by a jury of his peers — was let go, when the judge said to him at the end of the trial, “You are guilty, sir… but I cannot put in jail an innocent man.” You see, the murderer was a Siamese twin.
16. Largest penis (in proportion to its body): The Barnacle

[from All Songs Considered]

—via erintapscott