Nick Cave Quotes

No fish can swim until the King is born, until the King is born in Tupelo.

I have a very strange relationship in general with women around my music. There's some that understand it and some that think there should be a law against it.

I've got some words of wisdom.

Rock music is the province of the young, and it should be made by young people. I'm not running around in a pair of spandex tights trying to reclaim my youth.

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

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

What I want people to recognize is that we have to keep working together and take charge because we all have the same story.

The singing tells everybody what to do musically.

The way I go about writing records is that I make a calendar date to start the new record, so I have nothing. I don't have a bunch of notes that I bring into the office, I start with nothing at all.

Anything that I'm doing I'm writing specifically for a particular project.

It's always a pleasure on a personal note for me to come back to Australia.

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

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

I feel very much a part of what I'm writing about, and I'm writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I'm not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean.

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

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

We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, "Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?"

We are still struggling with people who don't feel comfortable going into museums. As a visual artist I ask how artists can be part of enacting a change.

L.A. is full of screenwriters. I don't know why. On many levels, it's such a thankless occupation.

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

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

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.

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.

Do I personally believe in a personal God? No.

God is in everything whether I'm mentioning him or not.

The actualising of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist.

My responsibility as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God.

Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.

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.

That's what we [outsiders] feel America is really about - the kind of crazed ravings of the Christian right - when it's probably something quite different.

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

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.

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

Jesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists - second rate Christianity.

That's what I like about watching a movie: you enter an imagined world that's more interesting, more engaging than your own. Or less painful than your own.

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

I have to be able to see the thing that's going on that I'm writing about, or else it just doesn't make any sense to me.

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

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

The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write.

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.

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.

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

I just found this world a hard place to be good in, ’ says Bunny, then he closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.

There are those who work so they can stop. Stopping is the why of work.There are those who stop so they can work.Working is the why of work.

Out of sorrow entire worlds have been builtOut of longing great wonders have been willed

But if you're gonna dine with them cannibalsSooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten . . .

My father was a teacher and my mother also worked in the school, so the family has a background in education.