The Birthday Party Quotes
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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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When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.
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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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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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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.
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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'm hugely self-critical in the morning.
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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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The way people reacted to me in dressing rooms and so on was incredibly aggressive. They know every record and they seem to think they should nudge me or bump into me as they go past. It was this incredible performance that used to amuse me. In the early days, people were drawn towards us like they'd be drawn towards a car smash...There is a definite relationship between that fanaticism and the fan that, as a performer, you expose more of yourself, of the undercurrents of your personality. Most rock personalities subdue that or choose not to explore it.
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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.
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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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God is in everything whether I'm mentioning him or not.
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I don't feel I'm thrown around by the winds of taste and fashion.`
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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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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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I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god.
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I've watched 'Oprah Winfrey.' And I'm proud. I don't care what anybody says! I don't know whether I've watched it. I've been in the room while it's been on.
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Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.
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I feel like I've spent the last five years of my life on the road. It hasn't affected my songs but it's probably affected everything else about me. Obviously, the more you travel, the wilder the things that keep happening to you, the more likely it is you'll get complete strangers knocking on your hotel room door.
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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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I'm a big fan of teatowels and am always on the lookout for a good one.
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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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I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.
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I love performing. I can get to be that person I always wanted to be - godlike.