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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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
Jesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists - second rate Christianity.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party
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I've always been at war with the guitar. All vocalists are fighting a war with the electric rhythm guitar.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
It's an Australian thing to be dismissive. We find that endearing. Americans don't. They believe what you say.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
Everybody tends to overplay live. That's just the nature of playing live. And that can be great, but it can also kill something that's special, and intimate, about a recorded version of a song. You find out very quickly which songs you can play, and which songs you do damage to by playing them live.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
I don't particularly believe all love is doomed. But I guess, one is usually kinda suffering from some aborted love affair or association, rather than being at the peak of one. I think it's fairly obvious that a lot more suffering goes on in the name of love than the little happiness you can squeeze out of it.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
I used to believe that if I could do certain things - write a book or be a successful musician - that I'd be transformed into a happy person, but it doesn't work that way.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party
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At school I was an anti-magnet for women.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
My responsibility as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
In getting older, I find myself becoming progressively more ineffectual in a lot of different ways, and part of that is down to no longer having the youthful feeling that what you're doing has any true impact.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
I think it's an essential fact for any performer or artist to fail as poignantly as they can succeed.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party
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As people buy less and less records, it's become more and more important for me to spend more and more on them - to lavish that much more attention on them. The Bad Seeds were always quite protective and old school, but Grinderman has opened us up to do anything and be shameless. We're not so precious about it.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
The more settled I've become, the more problematic my characters have become. There was a period when I wrote sensitive and gentle songs and these came at a time when life was at its most destructive. I think you write about what you need, on some level.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
What I think about when I frequent the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], and I look at these artifacts that are taken out of context and how we're forced to view them as objects, as relics, as sculpture- static. But what's interesting is what it allows me to do in my head in terms of imagining what the possibilities are or imagining the role in which they played within a particular culture which I'm fascinated by.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
After a while, you just don't do things you don't wanna do - that's the great freedom you get, the older you get. You learn what to do and what not to do, and what will be a waste of time and what won't be a waste of time.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
You know, an idea is just an idea. There seems to... the kind of epiphanies that you have, like the little sudden bursts of light, they're very small and they're very short and it's the pursuit of the idea that's the important thing. . . . I know a lot of people who have way better ideas than I do that-much more frequently than I do that just can't sit down and actually do it. Ideas are such are a little overrated really; it's the work behind the idea that's the important thing.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
It was about the preciousness of that, and how they viewed those birds as art, as something valuable. I didn't care one way or another back then, but now, thinking about my grandparents - who are still alive but getting older - I see the birds as sort of time capsules. Now I go home during the holidays and they hold a lot of weight in terms of nostalgia and memory. Now they mean everything.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party
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Most screen violence is tedious.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
It is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God...The love song is the sound of our endeavors to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
I have to be able to pull you in. How can I diversify my audiences? What role do I have to play to be part of that shift? I have to take that seriously.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party -
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.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party