Nick Cave Quotes

L.A. is full of screenwriters. I don't know why. On many levels, it's such a thankless occupation.

It's possible to get through life without a religious structure, but I don't think that's a very fruitful way to live.

I love performing. I can get to be that person I always wanted to be - godlike.

Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.

There Will Always Be Suffering
It Flows Through Life Like Water

I've always had an obligation to creation, above all.

If you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.

There are times when I think I can sing it better, but usually I find that I can't.

People think I'm a miserable sod but it's only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.

Self-editing is the way I write. Ten verses of a song and it's finished. Then we start playing it and if I see that it's too long, I'll start cutting.

I'm forever near a stereo saying, 'What the fuck is this garbage?' And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

To my undying shame, I do read reviews. I don't read them all, but I like to get some kind of idea how things are going.

I love being manipulated by what I see. I love weepies and romantic comedies where you're reaching for the Kleenex at the right moment.

It's always a pleasure on a personal note for me to come back to Australia.

My responsibility as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God.

Sorrow's child grieves not what has passed
But all the past still yet to come ...

I'm a big fan of teatowels and am always on the lookout for a good one.

I think there is a certain perversity in my music in that I continue, you know, to eat at the same ball of vomit year after year.

I've got some words of wisdom.

I'm a kind of hard-wired pessimist. I can't help but see the world in a certain kind of way.

Look, when I look back, from 20 onwards, I was actually having a pretty good time, I have to say.

Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.

The society of whores stuck needles in an image of me.

In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror.

Oh, we will know, won't we?
The stars will explode in the sky
Oh, but they don't, do they?
Stars have their moment and then they die

Said 2,000 years of Christian history, baby
And you ain't learned to love me yet?

I've always hated narrative songs. I hate those songs where, basically, it's an unfolding of a story.

It's an Australian thing to be dismissive. We find that endearing. Americans don't. They believe what you say.

Wanting everything is the thing that eventually tears you apart.

You don't meet a lot of people that you really like. I don't anyway.

The rock star is dying. And it's a small tragedy. Rock stars have blogs now. I have no use for that kind of rock star.

You've got to understand your limitations. It's your limitations that make you the wonderful disaster you most probably are.

If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?'

I've spent my life butting my head against other people's lack of imagination.

Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.

I've always been at war with the guitar. All vocalists are fighting a war with the electric rhythm guitar.

Inspiration is a word used by people who aren't really doing anything.

I think it's a part of us as human beings that we search outside of ourselves for meaning.

You ain't got no self-respect,
you feel like an insect
Well don't you worry buddy,
cause here he comes

I think there's a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence.

You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.

I'm an Australian, and when I grew up much of my influences were American - blues music and country music, all that sort of thing.

Vagina man,' said Bunny, and his two colleagues went quiet and nodded in silent agreement.

As Australians, we see the law as inherently bad. We have a real inherent distaste for authority in our makeup.

People are always surprised to see clues to my being a normal kind of guy. As if I'm somehow letting the team down.

And I kissed away a thousand tears My lady of the Various Sorrows Some begged, some borrowed, some stolen Some kept safe for tomorrow.

Comatose, Pa's wife, the slobstress, buried an armchair beneath her bulk.

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

Texting is apocalyptic on some level. It's a reduction of things.

I would hate to think my songs were giving advice to people.

I can control the weather with my moods. I just can't control my moods.

Love is a state that I would like to exist in continuously.

I am the captain of my pain.

Being a parent can make you a horrible person at times, because you're pushed to the limit constantly.

I write hate lyrics really well. It's not every day you can use them, really.

A is for Answering all your prayers, N is for kNowing that your loverman's going to be the answer ...

Hamlet got a gun now.

Most people wait for the muse to turn up. That's terribly unreliable. I have to sit down and pursue the muse by attempting to work.

I see it as my duty in some way is to be out in the world as an Australian putting forward what I consider to be authentic Australian music.

A rock musician's career is short-lived. To extend it, you need to do other things to keep yourself fresh.

am the guy with the flies. I am the one that dies.

To sustain hatred is a very difficult thing to do, year after year. It's exhausting.

When you're talking about rock n' roll, myth-making is what it's all about.

My father was a teacher and my mother also worked in the school, so the family has a background in education.

I'm hugely self-critical in the morning.

I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.

I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god.

When I perform onstage, I'm actually kind of nearsighted, so I don't have any real, true understanding of what the audience is like.

I still feel very much an imposter in the whole music scene, which I'm quite happy about to be honest.

I suspect the older you get the more invisible you become.

My true intent is all for your delight.

God is in everything whether I'm mentioning him or not.

Buddy, you've been warned.

I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don't like to get my knees dirty. I don't have a garden.

No wonder sorrow doesn't smile much. No wonder sadness is so sad.

I'm a bad motherfucker, don't you know
and I'll crawl over fifty good pussies just to get to one fat boy's asshole, said Stagger Lee.

I write songs from the point of view I had at a time;I'm not tryingto write songs from a young person's point of view.That only ends in disaster.

Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life.

I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.

I don't really do Japanese interviews. I don't think there's much call for me in Japan.

A gentleman never talks about his tailor.

You write a scene, and it works or it doesn't. It's immediate.

He who seeks, finds, and who knocks, will be let in,

What we [outsiders] feel America is really about - the kind of crazed ravings of the Christian right - when it's probably something quite different.

I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.

My music has to do with beauty, and it's intended to, if not lift the spirits, then be a kind of a balm to the spirits.

I want to write songs that are so sad, the kind of sad where you take someone's little finger and break it in three places.

If you took love out of the equation, I wouldn't know what else to write about.

You're one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan.

I always thought my records were number one; it's just the charts didn't think so.

I think I have always had a pretty strong creative impulse. And that has probably saved me from abandoning myself completely.

Oh, fuck it, I'm a monster, I admit it!

Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy.

Stars have their moments then they die.

I have a particular dislike for children's films. I'm way past the novelty aspect.

Do I personally believe in a personal God? No.

Most of my ideals and stuff really come from my mother.

No fish can swim until the King is born, until the King is born in Tupelo.

Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.

If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!