The Birthday Party Quotes
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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.
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My music has to do with beauty, and it's intended to, if not lift the spirits, then be a kind of a balm to the spirits.
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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.
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We are still struggling with people who don't feel comfortable going into museums. As a visual artist I ask how artists can be part of enacting a change.
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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.
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If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!
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Everyone wants to feel that they matter.
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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.
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The actualising of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist.
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Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.
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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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Sorrow's child grieves not what has passed, but all the past still yet to come.
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I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.
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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.
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No fish can swim until the King is born, until the King is born in Tupelo.
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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.
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I don't believe in an interventionist God...
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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.
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Jesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists - second rate Christianity.
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Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.
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At school I was an anti-magnet for women.
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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.
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I've always had an obligation to creation, above all.
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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.