Nick Cave Quotes

I don't feel I'm thrown around by the winds of taste and fashion.

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

I'm always sort of looking for projects that I can sort of put out into the world, into the public sphere, and to somehow cause an effect. I want to be able to create projects that sort of are going to make people think and think in this sort of magical, sort of fantastical way.

I lost my innocence with Johnny Cash. I used to watch the Johnny Cash Show on television in Wangaratta when I was about 9 or 10 years old. At that stage I had really no idea about rock'n'roll. I watched him and from that point I saw that music could be an evil thing, a beautiful, evil thing.

Not my biggest fear, but my biggest problem onstage is over-emphasizing what I do. I'm pushing too hard. You need to engage an audience. They need to be able to involve their own imaginations as well. They don't need everything thrust down their throat, and I have a tendency to do that. I always have had a tendency to do that.

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

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

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

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

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

The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.

Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you’re in the middle of it

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.

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

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

Out of sorrow entire worlds have been built out of longing great wonders have been willed they're only little tears darling let them spill and lay your head upon my shoulder.

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

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

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

Brother, be a brother, fill this tiny cup of mine. And please, sir, make it whiskey: I have no head for wine!

When I start to write a song, I initially fall into patterns and creative habits that are familiar, and because they're familiar, they sound convincing. It's important for me to not pursue those ideas, because I've already done them, but to find ideas that are different and feel strange to write and disconcerting to write.

I have a very strange relationship in general with women around my music. There's some that understand it and some that think there should be a law against it.

The songs that I like are the ones that you can't visualize, that are just cries from the heart - those very straight, direct songs that make rock & roll music so wonderful.

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

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.

I have to be able to pull you in. How can I diversify my audiences? What role do I have to play to be part of that shift? I have to take that seriously.

Guns are part of the American psyche, aren't they? This is collateral damage for having a Wild West mentality. It's intrinsic to the American psyche. It's never going to change.

An audience is the perfect thing to unleash venom and hate on. It doesn't necessarily mean you hate everyone in the audience but when you've got a so-called adoring mass in front of you, it's a perfect target for that kind of disgust. Sometimes you find yourself in a position where you're venting your disgust on an audience and a lot of them keep coming back 'cos they actually like that aspect. In a way that diffuses the feeling and you don't gel the same release.

The band is a living, breathing thing. It grows in the same way we do as human beings and if it doesn't, it dies. It's important to feed the organism, and one way of doing that is to set musical challenges that keep it alive.

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

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

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

The work ethic at art school is completely different than the work ethic amongst people who get into music. People who paint, it's an honorable thing to spend all day and all night in front of your canvas - that is the romantic vision of the painter.

We are still struggling with people who don't feel comfortable going into museums. As a visual artist I ask how artists can be part of enacting a change.

I get criticized for a lot of what I write about, but as far as I'm concerned I'm actually standing up and having a look at what goes on in the minds of men, and I have the authority to talk about it because I'm a man.

I have to be able to see the thing that's going on that I'm writing about, or else it just doesn't make any sense to me.

I write songs in batches and then record them and then can't write again for ages. I try and build one song upon another, they may not obviously look inter-related but often one song acts as a springboard into another.

Certainly being proficient in an instrument does have its problems. Because the better you get, the more you just start sounding like an ordinary guitarist. There are certainly guitarists that transcend that and do really find their sound and all that sort of stuff.

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

I'm hugely self-critical in the morning.

Well, as anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There's a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.

Accessible local libraries are vital to communities and to children.

At some point you start seeing the difference between what you really want, and what is your priority order. I feel that today I know what I want. That's the problem with perspective, as well as focus and concentration.

You're collaborating with people you don't even know, when you're making a film. You're collaborating with people you've never seen. So, the collaborative process is very, very different than when you're collaborating on a record with the musicians you've worked with all your life.

One thing that I'm really interested in is the kind of esoteric detail that surrounds these great figures. And Wikipedia is full of that kind of stuff, whether it's true or untrue. It staggers me: why, in the short space assigned to a person or an event, that kind of random information is there. To be honest, that's wonderful fuel for songwriting.

Stars have their moments then they die.

The love song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness.

At school I was an anti-magnet for women.