Nick Cave People Quotations

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

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

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.

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.

No, I wouldn't direct a movie, no. I couldn't. I don't have the patience for it, I don't have the people skills. You have to be clever. I'm not really clever in that kind of way. And you have to be able to manipulate people, but at the same time allow them to feel like they are manipulating you, to get the kind of movie that you want.

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

Most people wait for the muse to turn up. That's terribly unreliable. I have to sit down and pursue the muse by attempting to work.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's always a risky business inviting somebody on stage. You never know what they're going to do. I try to avoid letting people join me onstage because it can be very distracting, and overly theatrical.

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.

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.

I'm always sort of looking for projects that I can sort of put out into the world, into the public sphere, and to somehow cause an effect. I want to be able to create projects that sort of are going to make people think and think in this sort of magical, sort of fantastical way.

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.

Well, as anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There's a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.

Inspiration is a word used by people who aren't really doing anything. I go into my office every day that I'm in Brighton and work. Whether I feel like it or not is irrelevant.

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.

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.

You don't meet a lot of people that you really like. I don't anyway.

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.

You were the local joke, really, ... It kept sliding further into summer, and the locals were thinking it was going to be really funny watching these people try to make a movie under those conditions. Nobody could even open their mouth without a fly crawling into it.