Nick Cave Quotes
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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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A is for Answering all your prayers, N is for kNowing that your loverman's going to be the answer.
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I have things that I'm interested in, and I'm not really interested in writing about anything that I'm not interested in. But it's important to me to be able to see it from a different perspective, and add something new to the whole picture.
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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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The editing of a song is largely what makes the song for me and I think that actually if I had started going like 'I want you to burn' it would have pinned that song down to a particular thing and made that song a smaller idea than what it is. By leaving that off it's much more open, broader.
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There's that kind of song, "Whoah baby, I love you," which doesn't have a visual element, but a very strong emotional element, and these are the great songs to me - those ones that you put them on and they just make you feel great, or whatever.
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Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.
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I've had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn't really require you to sit down and work out what the story's about. You're brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it's kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It's taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out.
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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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At the end, we're kind of observers - creative people, I mean. I feel like an observer, and I'm pretty much able to step out of things and see how things are playing out.
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I think there's a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence.
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My muse is my wife. It's not some vague thing that flutters around the astrosphere or wherever it is. Sometimes as a songwriter you need something to hang a song on, to give it some kind of presence and form. For me, Susie is that.
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I'm a believer. I don't go to church. I don't belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn't write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.
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I'm not in the business of telling people what to do. I'm much more in the business of describing things, situations and stuff like that and leaving them out there, and you can make up your minds about them.
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I want to write songs that are so sad, the kind of sad where you take someone's little finger and break it in three places.
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Well, as anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There's a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.
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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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There's always pain around. That's one thing you can guarantee in life - there will always be a surplus of pain.
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This is how it essentially is for Bunny Junior. He loves his dad. He thinks there is no dad better, cleverer, or more capable, and he stands there beside him with a sense of pride - he's my dad - and he also, of course, stands beside him because he has nowhere else to go.
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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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The way people reacted to me in dressing rooms and so on was incredibly aggressive. They know every record and they seem to think they should nudge me or bump into me as they go past. It was this incredible performance that used to amuse me. In the early days, people were drawn towards us like they'd be drawn towards a car smash...There is a definite relationship between that fanaticism and the fan that, as a performer, you expose more of yourself, of the undercurrents of your personality. Most rock personalities subdue that or choose not to explore it.
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I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god.
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The band is a living, breathing thing. It grows in the same way we do as human beings and if it doesn't, it dies. It's important to feed the organism, and one way of doing that is to set musical challenges that keep it alive.
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Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life.