The Birthday Party Quotes
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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.
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The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.
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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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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.
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You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.
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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.
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There are times when I think I can sing it better, but usually I find that I can't.
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What you're really after when you see a film or listen to a song is a singular vision, and I'm not sure how much of that you really get in Hollywood.
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You're collaborating with people you don't even know, when you're making a film. You're collaborating with people you've never seen. So, the collaborative process is very, very different than when you're collaborating on a record with the musicians you've worked with all your life.
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Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy.
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I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.
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I don't know, maybe Australian humour isn't supposed to be funny. It's as dry as the Sahara, and I think people miss that.
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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.
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I think it's an essential fact for any performer or artist to fail as poignantly as they can succeed.
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My responsibility as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God.
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It's very intuitive, the way that I approach my work. I only buy something that has a pulse. I may not know how I'm going to use it, but I know it has a pulse and it has multiple readings - if I shift it one way or another, it can be read this way or it can be read that way, but both readings are critical and very much ground the work.
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Outside the world of politics, one person in the world of the arts I would mention as an influence is Nick Cave, another person who has been around since the late 1970s. He has developed and changed remarkably, whilst remaining true to his vision. He has been a great help to me as well, without his knowing it.
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It's an Australian thing to be dismissive. We find that endearing. Americans don't. They believe what you say.
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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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Hamlet got a gun now.
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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.
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This is how it essentially is for Bunny Junior. He loves his dad. He thinks there is no dad better, cleverer, or more capable, and he stands there beside him with a sense of pride - he's my dad - and he also, of course, stands beside him because he has nowhere else to go.
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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.
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God is in everything whether I'm mentioning him or not.