- All Quotes
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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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There are times when I think I can sing it better, but usually I find that I can't.
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I don't believe in an interventionist God...
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Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.
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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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An artist's duty is rather to stay open-minded and in a state where he can receive information and inspiration. You always have to be ready for that little artistic Epiphany.
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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 think it's an essential fact for any performer or artist to fail as poignantly as they can succeed.
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I'm hugely self-critical in the morning.
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It's very intuitive, the way that I approach my work. I only buy something that has a pulse. I may not know how I'm going to use it, but I know it has a pulse and it has multiple readings - if I shift it one way or another, it can be read this way or it can be read that way, but both readings are critical and very much ground the work.
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The more settled I've become, the more problematic my characters have become. There was a period when I wrote sensitive and gentle songs and these came at a time when life was at its most destructive. I think you write about what you need, on some level.
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Outside the world of politics, one person in the world of the arts I would mention as an influence is Nick Cave, another person who has been around since the late 1970s. He has developed and changed remarkably, whilst remaining true to his vision. He has been a great help to me as well, without his knowing it.
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There's an element to songwriting that I can't explain, that comes from somewhere else. I can't explain that dividing line between nothing and something that happens within a song, where you have absolutely nothing, and then suddenly you have something. It's like the origin of the universe.
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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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I feel like I've spent the last five years of my life on the road. It hasn't affected my songs but it's probably affected everything else about me. Obviously, the more you travel, the wilder the things that keep happening to you, the more likely it is you'll get complete strangers knocking on your hotel room door.
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...be mindful of the prayers you send pray hard but pray with care for the tears you are crying now are just your answered prayers letters of light we scale merrily, move mysteriously around so that when you think you're climbing up, man, in fact you're climbing down...
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I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.
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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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My responsibility as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God.
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I'm a big fan of teatowels and am always on the lookout for a good one.
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The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.
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It was about the preciousness of that, and how they viewed those birds as art, as something valuable. I didn't care one way or another back then, but now, thinking about my grandparents - who are still alive but getting older - I see the birds as sort of time capsules. Now I go home during the holidays and they hold a lot of weight in terms of nostalgia and memory. Now they mean everything.
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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.
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God is in everything whether I'm mentioning him or not.