"I wanted to be an old man when I was a little kid. Wore my granddaddy’s hat, used his cane, and lowered my voice. I was dying to be old. I paid a lot of attention to old people. The music I listened to as a teenager was old-people music. Yeah, I heard The Beatles, but I didn’t really pay attention. I was suspicious of anyone new and young. I don’t know, probably a respect thing? My father left when I was about eleven—I think I looked up to older musicians like father figures. Louis Armstrong or Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole or Howlin’ Wolf—I never really thought about it that way, but maybe it was that I needed parental guidance or something." - Tom Waits

“Most artists you hear are really doing bad imitations of other people, And they’re afraid you’re going to notice it. If Howlin’ Wolf told you he was really trying to sound like Jimmie Rodgers, you’d say ‘nice try, missed it by a mile.’ Well, that mile is his work…. To me, what artists do is take in all this information and send back a picture of something that’s moving. Recordings are like little postings, an ongoing conversation that’s part of living culture. You’re always sending feelers out, to find new protein or carbohydrates, and sometimes what you bring back is a Salvation Army relic. Sometimes the most pleasant thing is to go backwards.” - Tom Waits

both from Paul Maher's Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters 

"What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking consciousness become more and more dangerous.... Beat and tension, blood and intellect, Destiny and Causality, are to one another as the countryside in bloom is to the city of stone, as something existing per se to something existing dependently. Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness. But Civilisation is nothing but tension. 

 "Intelligence is only the capacity for understanding at high tension.... The advance too, from peasant wisdom - "slimness", mother wit, instinct, based as in other animals on the sensed beat of life - through the city-spirit to the cosmopolitan intelligence - the very word with its sharp ring betraying the disappearance of the old cosmic foundation - can be described as a steady diminution of the Destiny-feeling and an unrestrained augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality.

"Intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by the exercise of thought, masterly, but bloodless and jejeune...."

Spengler 

"It's an odd thing getting old. On the one hand. you think "I want to make every day count". On the other, you think "can I be arsed?".  Or simply "I'm so knackered". I have about six or seven ideas for books that itch quite strongly. But I have an equally strong counter-impulse (not the right word, that's too dynamic - it's more like a prolapse of the will, a spreading swamp of apathy) to never do another book.  I suppose  the point really is to not think about the finish line and how dauntingly far off it might seem, but more about how alluring the process of doing them is, or isn't. The reason to do it would be more about being energized and re-purposed in the now - rather some supposed achievement at the end of the process."

- Ronny Mieldsen

on the Queen's death and the supposed strangeness of mourning someone you didn't know and who didn't know you

"Yeah but that is fame isn’t it - “lovely strangers” as David Thomson the film critic puts it - or not-so-lovely strangers - they traipse into your psyche and set up shop there. The feelings are different than the ones for parents or siblings or friends or colleagues or neighbors - but they are feelings. Attachments."

"For stasis, as I intend the term, is not an absence of novelty and change — a total quiescence — but rather the absence of ordered sequential change. Like molecules rushing about haphazardly in a Brownian movement, a culture bustling with activity and change may nevertheless be static."

  Leonard B. Meyer's 1967 book, Music, The Arts, and Ideas 

‘I have often thought that writers don’t necessarily write their books in their real order. Empire of the Sun may well be my first novel, which I just happened to write when I was fifty-four. It may well be that Vermilion Sands [1971] is my last book.'

J.G. Ballard

"Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language" - Wittgenstein

 "Why didn't I become a blues guitarist? Probably because I wasn't a very good blues guitarist. The thing is, a lot of young players and some established players have said to me, 'I only wanted to be like Clapton.' They didn't say it, but you knew it. That wasn't my aim. Stunning player, but... The question eventually became formulated for me as, 'What would Hendrix sound like playing the Bartók String Quartets?'"

— Robert Fripp