Nick Cave Quotes
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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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Not my biggest fear, but my biggest problem onstage is over-emphasizing what I do. I'm pushing too hard. You need to engage an audience. They need to be able to involve their own imaginations as well. They don't need everything thrust down their throat, and I have a tendency to do that. I always have had a tendency to do that.
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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.
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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...
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Despite what people might think, I'm not interested in being dark all the time. I'm actually searching for some kind of light, and I'm always very happy when I can achieve that.
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I'm unable to really write the kind of song that doesn't have a visual element, which most songs don't.
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I've always done a lot of research and stuff around the songs that I write so there are pages and pages of writing and you can kind of see these songs emerging.
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I write songs in batches and then record them and then can't write again for ages. I try and build one song upon another, they may not obviously look inter-related but often one song acts as a springboard into another.
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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.
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I am the captain of my pain.
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I've spent my life butting my head against other people's lack of imagination.
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Anything that I'm doing I'm writing specifically for a particular project.
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The more information you have, the more human our heroes become and consequently the less mysterious and godlike. They need to be godlike.Nick
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I feel very much a part of what I'm writing about, and I'm writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I'm not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean.
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Death looms large I guess because it should. It's the one thing that we as human beings from birth have a right to. It's the only thing we've really got, and I don't mean to sound bleak about this, but it's a unifying factor amongst us all.
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You can't trust an artist that just makes good records.
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I don't like those songs where you have to listen to a story to get into them. I don't want to have to pay attention to music in that way, I just want it to hit me in the heart and do what music's supposed to do.
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When I’m singing “Deanna,” for example, which I sing pretty much every night, it brings forward a kind of imagined, romanticized lie about this particular person, which I find really comforting and exciting to sing about.
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Into the mercy seat I climb My head is shaved, my head is wired And like a moth that tries To enter the bright eye I go shuffling out of life Just to hide in death awhile And anyway I never lied.
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Do I personally believe in a personal God? No.
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I don't really care who collects my work, black, white, red, yellow. You have to also be consciously aware of, what does this mean in your home? And how are you supporting this work and the message behind the work?
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And she moves among the sparrows. And she floats upon the breeze. She moves among the flowers. She moves something deep inside of me...
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I was reading The Bible a lot through my 20s, mostly the Old Testament, just because I was knocked out by the language and the stories. I felt that the God being talked about there, who was this insane, vindictive patriarch - it was kind of thrilling, and titillated something in me at the time.
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I have a very strange relationship in general with women around my music. There's some that understand it and some that think there should be a law against it.