The Birthday Party Quotes
- All Quotes
- News Quotes
-
The love song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness.
-
I always thought my records were number one; it's just the charts didn't think so.
-
Cynicism and defensiveness are two things constantly levelled at me. Look, I've got time for people, I'm good mannered. I usually find that when you're down, nobody has a bloody minute for you. If I was a nobody, you wouldn't even talk to me. People, in general, don't like you being upfront and civil. They hate you for it. They label you a cynic 'cos you're reasonable.
-
I just found this world a hard place to be good in,’ says Bunny, then he closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.
-
I'm an Australian, and when I grew up much of my influences were American - blues music and country music, all that sort of thing.
-
It's always a risky business inviting somebody on stage. You never know what they're going to do. I try to avoid letting people join me onstage because it can be very distracting, and overly theatrical.
-
Everyone wants to feel that they matter.
-
I'm not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it's quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It's just full of all these open wounds we don't really know what to do with.
-
God has matured. He is not the impulsive, bowelless being of the Testaments - the vehement glorymonger, with His bag of cheap carny tricks and his booming voice - the fiery huckster with his burning bushes and his wonder wands. Nowadays God knows what He wants and He knows who He wants.
-
I love rock-n-roll. I think it's an exciting art form. It's revolutionary. Still revolutionary and it changed people. It changed their hearts. But yeah, even rock-n-roll has a lot of rubbish, really bad music.
-
Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.
-
No fish can swim until the King is born, until the King is born in Tupelo.
-
The secret to longevity in the music business is to change, and to be able to change. [...] An actor has to assume other people's identities. A rock star doesn't need to do that. [...] But change is important.
-
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.
-
If you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.
-
Sorrow's child grieves not what has passed, but all the past still yet to come.
-
Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.
-
The actualising of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist.
-
I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I've always had an obligation to creation, above all.
-
Jesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists - second rate Christianity.
-
I lost my innocence with Johnny Cash. I used to watch the Johnny Cash Show on television in Wangaratta when I was about 9 or 10 years old. At that stage I had really no idea about rock'n'roll. I watched him and from that point I saw that music could be an evil thing, a beautiful, evil thing.