Quote of the Day (Waits)

“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” —Singer/songwriter/boozehound Tom Waits, Creem Magazine, 1978

(In time, of course, Waits would dispense with the “bottle in front of me,” too—though, we hope, not with the bent sensibility that produced his best songs, as well as this bit of wordplay. His longtime vantage point from the lower depths of society, however, has made him a voice for the “marginalized and misunderstood,” allowing him to “express their capacity for hope and instinct for happiness” in “authentic songs devoid of vanity and false illusions,” Father Antonio Spadaro wrote more than a year ago in the Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica.)