The Birthday Party Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Everyone wants to feel that they matter.
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I always thought my records were number one; it's just the charts didn't think so.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sorrow's child grieves not what has passed, but all the past still yet to come.
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As Australians, we see the law as inherently bad. We have a real inherent distaste for authority in our makeup.
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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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Being a parent can make you a horrible person at times, because you're pushed to the limit constantly.
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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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Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.
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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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My records are basically a litany of complaints against the world, and I'm quite like that in real life as well.
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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.
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The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor.
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Musicians are at the bottom of the creative pyramid and authors are at the top, and many people think it's unacceptable for someone to attempt to jump from the bottom to the top of the pyramid.
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I don't believe in an interventionist God...
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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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If you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.
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Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy.
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At school I was an anti-magnet for women.