- All Quotes
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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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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.
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If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!
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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 just found this world a hard place to be good in,’ says Bunny, then he closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.
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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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Sorrow's child grieves not what has passed, but all the past still yet to come.
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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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I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.
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If you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.
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Cynicism and defensiveness are two things constantly levelled at me. Look, I've got time for people, I'm good mannered. I usually find that when you're down, nobody has a bloody minute for you. If I was a nobody, you wouldn't even talk to me. People, in general, don't like you being upfront and civil. They hate you for it. They label you a cynic 'cos you're reasonable.
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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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Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.
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No fish can swim until the King is born, until the King is born in Tupelo.
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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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I don't believe in an interventionist God...
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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've always been at war with the guitar. All vocalists are fighting a war with the electric rhythm guitar.
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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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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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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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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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The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write.