Nick Cave Quotes
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I became a script writer with absolutely no idea of how to write a script whatsoever. I still feel a bit of an outsider in that regard. If I can maintain that approach to screenwriting, it can continue to be enjoyable.
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Everyone wants to feel that they matter.
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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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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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If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!
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Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.
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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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What I think about when I frequent the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], and I look at these artifacts that are taken out of context and how we're forced to view them as objects, as relics, as sculpture- static. But what's interesting is what it allows me to do in my head in terms of imagining what the possibilities are or imagining the role in which they played within a particular culture which I'm fascinated by.
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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.
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I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.
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Being a parent can make you a horrible person at times, because you're pushed to the limit constantly.
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I don't believe in an interventionist God...
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I always thought my records were number one; it's just the charts didn't think so.
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At school I was an anti-magnet for women.
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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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If you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.
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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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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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You know, an idea is just an idea. There seems to... the kind of epiphanies that you have, like the little sudden bursts of light, they're very small and they're very short and it's the pursuit of the idea that's the important thing. . . . I know a lot of people who have way better ideas than I do that-much more frequently than I do that just can't sit down and actually do it. Ideas are such are a little overrated really; it's the work behind the idea that's the important thing.
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The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.
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Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy.
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After a while, you just don't do things you don't wanna do - that's the great freedom you get, the older you get. You learn what to do and what not to do, and what will be a waste of time and what won't be a waste of time.
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Everybody tends to overplay live. That's just the nature of playing live. And that can be great, but it can also kill something that's special, and intimate, about a recorded version of a song. You find out very quickly which songs you can play, and which songs you do damage to by playing them live.
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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.