Nick Cave Quotes
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Everyone wants to feel that they matter.
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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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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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I love rock-n-roll. I think it's an exciting art form. It's revolutionary. Still revolutionary and it changed people. It changed their hearts. But yeah, even rock-n-roll has a lot of rubbish, really bad music.
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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.
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I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.
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Sorrow's child grieves not what has passed, but all the past still yet to come.
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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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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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The actualising of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist.
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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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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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I'm hugely self-critical in the morning.
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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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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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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've always been at war with the guitar. All vocalists are fighting a war with the electric rhythm guitar.
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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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As people buy less and less records, it's become more and more important for me to spend more and more on them - to lavish that much more attention on them. The Bad Seeds were always quite protective and old school, but Grinderman has opened us up to do anything and be shameless. We're not so precious about it.
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It's always a risky business inviting somebody on stage. You never know what they're going to do. I try to avoid letting people join me onstage because it can be very distracting, and overly theatrical.
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I've always had an obligation to creation, above all.
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I don't know, maybe Australian humour isn't supposed to be funny. It's as dry as the Sahara, and I think people miss that.