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Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party
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If you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
...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...
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party
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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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
Love songs come in many guises and are seemingly written for many reasons – as declarations or to wound – I have written songs for all of these reasons – but ultimately the love songs exist to fill, with language, the silence between ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party
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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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
Sorrow's child grieves not what has passed, but all the past still yet to come.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
It's very important that the music has a sense of adventure to it, and that it's done by the seat of your pants. There's a kind of nervy element about it.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
The way I go about writing records is that I make a calendar date to start the new record, so I have nothing. I don't have a bunch of notes that I bring into the office, I start with nothing at all.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts know it That you weren't much of a muse, but then I weren't much of a poet...
Nick Cave The Birthday Party
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I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
I get criticized for a lot of what I write about, but as far as I'm concerned I'm actually standing up and having a look at what goes on in the minds of men, and I have the authority to talk about it because I'm a man.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party