Nick Cave Quotes

All of our days are numbered. We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all, because the worth of an idea never becomes apparent until you do it.

I’m a believer. I don’t go to church. I don’t belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn’t write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.

One of my big fears is drying up, and the more I create, the more I feel myself shrinking beneath the backlog of work I’ve done.

If I’m hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, ‘Hey, why don’t you go downstairs and start a new novel?’

Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you’re in the middle of it

Accessible local libraries are vital to communities and to children.

When you’re making a film, there are so many people involved that you get opinions and notes from people and you don’t even know who they are. I find that quite difficult and it wears you down.

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.

It’s an Australian thing to be dismissive. We find that endearing. Americans don’t. They believe what you say.

I would hate to think my songs were giving advice to people.

The work ethic at art school is completely different than the work ethic amongst people who get into music. People who paint, it’s an honorable thing to spend all day and all night in front of your canvas – that is the romantic vision of the painter.

Guns are part of the American psyche, aren’t they? This is collateral damage for having a Wild West mentality. It’s intrinsic to the American psyche. It’s never going to change.

I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don’t like to get my knees dirty. I don’t have a garden.

I won’t go into the details, but I ready myself for the day. I am a high-maintenance type of guy.

I want to write songs that are so sad, the kind of sad where you take someone’s little finger and break it in three places.

I have a particular dislike for children’s films. I’m way past the novelty aspect.

It’s possible to get through life without a religious structure, but I don’t think that’s a very fruitful way to live.

I’ve always hated narrative songs. I hate those songs where, basically, it’s an unfolding of a story.

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.

Most of the time, feelings just seem to get in the way. They’re a luxury for the idle, a bourgeois concept. Feelings are overrated.

I see it as my duty in some way is to be out in the world as an Australian putting forward what I consider to be authentic Australian music.

I don’t write happy songs. Who does? I don’t know anybody who writes happy songs, really.

I always thought my records were number one; it’s just the charts didn’t think so.

I’ve always done a lot of research and stuff around the songs that I write so there are pages and pages of writing and you can kind of see these songs emerging.

At some point you start seeing the difference between what you really want, and what is your priority order. I feel that today I know what I want. That’s the problem with perspective, as well as focus and concentration.

I don’t really do Japanese interviews. I don’t think there’s much call for me in Japan.

I’m very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It’s the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.

I’ve never been interested in being relevant.

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.

Early on I realized when you write a song about someone, it flatters them on some level, and gives you a lot of room to move within a relationship. A song can kind of get the girl, for sure.

If you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.

I don’t think Hollywood makes many good films anymore. How many directors can you really trust to have an artistic vision, not a corporate vision or a watered-down communal one?

The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It’s the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song.

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.

As Australians, we see the law as inherently bad. We have a real inherent distaste for authority in our makeup.

Your limitations make you the wonderful disaster you most probably are.

I get criticized for a lot of what I write about, but as far as I’m concerned I’m actually standing up and having a look at what goes on in the minds of men, and I have the authority to talk about it because I’m a man.

I don’t have any authority to talk about the domestic policies of America. But as an outsider, I am mystified by the fact that you are encouraged to buy a gun, but if you use it for the purpose that it is expressly designed for, you get the death penalty. That aspect of America is kind of mystifying.

I’m a big fan of teatowels and am always on the lookout for a good one.

Certainly being proficient in an instrument does have its problems. Because the better you get, the more you just start sounding like an ordinary guitarist. There are certainly guitarists that transcend that and do really find their sound and all that sort of stuff.

Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It’s an unsightly act.

I’m a kind of hard-wired pessimist. I can’t help but see the world in a certain kind of way.

The band is a living, breathing thing. It grows in the same way we do as human beings and if it doesn’t, it dies. It’s important to feed the organism, and one way of doing that is to set musical challenges that keep it alive.

My muse is my wife. It’s not some vague thing that flutters around the astrosphere or wherever it is. Sometimes as a songwriter you need something to hang a song on, to give it some kind of presence and form. For me, Susie is that.

Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.

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.

I’ve always worn suits. To me they’re a very practical kind of thing to wear. You put one on and don’t really have to think about what you’re going to wear.

Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.

The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor.

I write hate lyrics really well. It’s not every day you can use them, really.

Being a parent can make you a horrible person at times, because you’re pushed to the limit constantly.

I know when I sit with my band members and we’re playing back a song that we’ve done, I know that they’re experiencing it in a completely different way and hearing stuff that they’re alerted to because the way the interpret the world is through their ears. Mine is through my eyes.

A gentleman never talks about his tailor.

Kylie Minogue is the greatest thing that has happened to Australian music.

You write a scene, and it works or it doesn’t. It’s immediate.

I can control the weather with my moods. I just can’t control my moods.

He who seeks, finds, and who knocks, will be let in.

I’m not in the business of telling people what to do. I’m much more in the business of describing things, situations and stuff like that and leaving them out there, and you can make up your minds about them.

If you took love out of the equation, I wouldn’t know what else to write about.

I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.

A rock musician’s career is short-lived. To extend it, you need to do other things to keep yourself fresh.

Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life.

Love is a state that I would like to exist in continuously.

The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil.

The songs that I like are the ones that you can’t visualize, that are just cries from the heart – those very straight, direct songs that make rock & roll music so wonderful.

Getting married, for me, was the best thing I ever did. I was suddenly beset with an immense sense of release, that we have something more important than our separate selves, and that is the marriage. There’s immense happiness that can come from working towards that.

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.

When you’re talking about rock n’ roll, myth-making is what it’s all about.

I was reading The Bible a lot through my 20s, mostly the Old Testament, just because I was knocked out by the language and the stories. I felt that the God being talked about there, who was this insane, vindictive patriarch – it was kind of thrilling, and titillated something in me at the time.

At the end, we’re kind of observers – creative people, I mean. I feel like an observer, and I’m pretty much able to step out of things and see how things are playing out.

I suspect the older you get the more invisible you become.

I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can’t really find a way to change those things.

I am not interested in anything that doesn’t have a genuine heart to it. You’ve got to have soul in the hole. If that isn’t there, I don’t see the point.

Moving to the country is a very bold thing to do. You can have vague romantic notions about doing that, but in actuality, it can be a terrifying thing.

People often can’t separate, or can’t understand, that to be funny is to be serious; it’s a way of pulling people in and not scaring them off. I think a lot of the funny stuff, underneath it, there’s a deep anxiety going on.

The more information you have, the more human our heroes become and consequently the less mysterious and godlike. They need to be godlike.

There’s always pain around. That’s one thing you can guarantee in life – there will always be a surplus of pain.

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.

I think it’s a part of us as human beings that we search outside of ourselves for meaning.

Look, when I look back, from 20 onwards, I was actually having a pretty good time, I have to say.

Despite what people might think, I’m not interested in being dark all the time. I’m actually searching for some kind of light, and I’m always very happy when I can achieve that.

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.

The guitar is something you kind of embrace, and the piano is something you kind of – when you play it, you sort of push it away. It feels very different.

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.

It’s a wonderful life if you can find it.

The last thing I ever wanted to get involved with is Hollywood. The way it works is that people get an idea you could possibly do something, but there’s a one-in-a-hundred chance that it could get made.

The concept of God in America is very different than it is in England. Because we see the horrendous outcome of religion as being an American thing, in which the name of God has been hijacked by a gang of psychopaths and bullies and homophobes, and the name of God has been used for their own twisted agendas.

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.

I’ve spent my life butting my head against other people’s lack of imagination.

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.

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.

But if you’re gonna dine with them cannibals Sooner or later, darling, you’re gonna get eaten . . .

At school I was an anti-magnet for women.

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.

‘Inspiration’ is a word used by people who aren’t really doing anything.

Songs you can dip in and out of, but a book… well, it can overpower you.

I’ve always been at war with the guitar. All vocalists are fighting a war with the electric rhythm guitar.

The rock star is dying. And it’s a small tragedy. Rock stars have blogs now. I have no use for that kind of rock star.

People think I’m a miserable sod but it’s only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.

People are always surprised to see clues to my being a normal kind of guy. As if I’m somehow letting the team down.

If beautiful movies can influence you to go out and hug your children, then we have to be honest and say that other movies can inspire you to do bad things.

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.

With writing a song, I’ve always felt, right from the start, like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don’t ever feel there’s a font of ideas to fall back on.

To my undying shame, I do read reviews. I don’t read them all, but I like to get some kind of idea how things are going.

The only person who can say they’re happy getting old is someone who isn’t actually old yet. Every day, I get less and less happy about that idea.

Most of my ideals and stuff really come from my mother.

I’m hugely self-critical in the morning.

When you’re on your own, you have all the self-censorship that everybody has when they try and write. All the little voices that say, ‘No, you can’t write that, what will they think of that?’

I don’t feel I’m thrown around by the winds of taste and fashion.

The problem with books, now that I’ve written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It’s the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song. What do I write about? I never know.

I’m kind of old-school and love nothing more than sitting, opening a book, and reading it. But I also love listening to audio books.