Nick Cave Quotes
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I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.
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Everyone wants to feel that they matter.
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A rock musician's career is short-lived. To extend it, you need to do other things to keep yourself fresh.
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If you're Australian, you feel it in your bones because you're at odds with everybody else, except other Australians, in the sense that people always seem to be behaving strangely. People always seem to be behaving the wrong way, in a different way. You say things and there are silences.
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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.
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Songs need to have the ability to change and to grow for sure. They take on lives of their own. Some songs just don't have that capacity. They're locked within a period of time. And as soon as you take them out of that period of time, they die very quickly.
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Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.
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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.
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No fish can swim until the King is born, until the King is born in Tupelo.
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I consider myself to be first and foremost a comic writer. The way I entertain myself - especially in those long and grim hours in the office - is to write stuff I find funny.
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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.
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I'm hugely self-critical in the morning.
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Jesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists - second rate Christianity.
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I'm not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it's quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It's just full of all these open wounds we don't really know what to do with.
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God has matured. He is not the impulsive, bowelless being of the Testaments - the vehement glorymonger, with His bag of cheap carny tricks and his booming voice - the fiery huckster with his burning bushes and his wonder wands. Nowadays God knows what He wants and He knows who He wants.
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Musicians are at the bottom of the creative pyramid and authors are at the top, and many people think it's unacceptable for someone to attempt to jump from the bottom to the top of the pyramid.
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The secret to longevity in the music business is to change, and to be able to change. [...] An actor has to assume other people's identities. A rock star doesn't need to do that. [...] But change is important.
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As Australians, we see the law as inherently bad. We have a real inherent distaste for authority in our makeup.
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Most screen violence is tedious.
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When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.
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The actualising of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist.
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My records are basically a litany of complaints against the world, and I'm quite like that in real life as well.
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There are times when I think I can sing it better, but usually I find that I can't.
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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.