A Quote by Tom Waits

I dunno when I started writing really. I was, like, filling out applications and stuff real early. Last name first, first name last, sex. 'occasionally' , stuff like that. Then I was writing letters, filling out forms, writing on bathroom walls.
I started writing when I was around 6. I say 'writing,' but it was really just making up stuff! I started writing and doing my own thing. I didn't really know what a demo was or anything like that, so I started getting interested in studio gear and started learning about one instrument at a time. My first instrument was an accordion.
I started training wrestling in the pre-social media era and I was very cautious - I thought, 'I can't have people know my real last name.' So I changed my last name to End because I always called myself 'The End.' I thought that was cool. I thought I'd take my real first name and my 'fake' last name, and that's how I came up with Tommy End.
When I first went to Japan, I was wrestling under my real name. The Japanese people have a great amount of difficulty with the letters f, r and l. So three out of the six letters in my first name they couldn't say. It was a bit of a mouthful for those guys.
I like to tell kids that I started thinking about stories when I first started reading stuff like Dr. Seuss and 'Go, Dog. Go!,' thinking, 'Oh yeah, that's funny. I'd like to do that.' And then writing throughout school, but at the same time I was studying pre-med stuff, because my mom told me I should be a doctor.
When I first got sick, they told me I had a year to live, and I was writing my memoir really fast. There were really weird things happening with my nervous system and my heart and stuff, and it didn't look like I was gonna make it, so I was writing really fast, and then I couldn't write anymore.
My first name is a boy's name. It's Tanner. I've always gone by my middle name but, yeah, my first name is Tanner. And King is my mom's last name. I took my mom's last name since I was 18.
As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing.
When you have this long of a run [in The Big Bang Theory], you don't have to have something happen every episode. Like, Sheldon lost his virginity last season and in the first season he didn't even like girls. So I feel like you can earn that stuff. And that is really fun, because you get to find new layers. It's a testament to the writing.
I started writing songs for youth theater and stuff, and so it's really writing music for the stage that started me out, but then I eventually went to music college and did a two-year course in contemporary music and then just played in endless bands, cover bands, jazz bands.
My real last name is Flores, and Milian is actually my mom's maiden name. So it's not made up, which is cool; it runs in the family. And it actually worked out better for my career to have the last name Milian, because Flores kept me in a little box, and no one really associated me with the last name Flores.
I always loved writing, but I feel like I really started writing when I got my BlackBerry . It was the first time I could take these crazy thoughts in my head and actually get them out. This little device became my journal on the road.
Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.
You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
My writing process is consecutive, like, 'mad scientist' crazy. It's not totally writing something that rhymes or even writing a rap necessarily. Sometimes it's just writing down stuff that I'm going through.
You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.
Most of the time I'm not really attracted to writing that's focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like work that gets out in the world and lets the world shape the poem.
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