Nick Cave Quotations | Page 2

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

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.

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

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.

You can't trust an artist that just makes good records.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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'm not someone who's particularly in touch with the way they feel. I've heard it said that you should be a 'human being' not a 'human doing', but I'm a human doing, very much so.

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.

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.

Self-editing is the way I write. Ten verses of a song and it's finished. Then we start playing it and if I see that it's too long, I'll start cutting.

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.

The idea of acting is something that absolutely repulses me. I just can't do it. I'm terrible at it. I get roped into films every now and then, and it's always a disaster.

I guess in all these films, ... there is a sense that morality is a luxury that we can afford in less fraught times, but in extreme situations and extreme environments, morality becomes a very grey issue.

For me, what we didn't want was the American-style hero,

I always heard it musically, and I guess it's written rhythmically as well ... It's very similar to the way my band operates. There are moments of intense violence and there are also moments of long, lyrical, quiet sadness.

I always heard it musically, and I guess it's written rhythmically as well,

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

I was determined not to spend inordinate amounts of time on something I felt would fundamentally never get made.

I think for Johnny, Australia had its western story as well,

I was making them do things and make the decisions that I always wanted them to do in movies. I mean, we had no story, we only had the proposition, so I was just writing 10 pages a day and handing them over and seeing what happens.

This one's got a story rather than being a series of cool vignettes.

They all have their share of thoughts about what needs to be done. So we just ignored them.

I've always been interested in both areas. For a long time, they were on a parallel plane, and I didn't dedicate myself to one or the other any less or any more. And then I just reached a revelation that it wasn't just about dance, it wasn't about fine art. It was about these two forces that were important to me, finding a medium that would allow me to investigate both.

Our Easters were elaborate productions with these big Easter Egg hunts out in the woods, and it was always, like, major . There was a golden egg and these crazy Easter baskets. My mother had seven sisters, and they all had children, so we'd have like 40 kids doing stuff together. It was a very celebrated time, one of many, and I realize now how it affected me as a kid.

Oh, I don't know about that. I make the suits, so I don't know.

Aw, look, I don't know. I think I'd rather him do that than me.

It was a good script and it was a great story. It was just that it was basically an American western dumped in Australia. When I read it, I thought everyone's been behaving properly. Where's the incompetence, where's the failure?

I just sat down and banged it out in the spirit of those old Hollywood guys.

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.

Songs need to have the ability to change and to grow for sure. They take on lives of their own. Some songs just don't have that capacity. They're locked within a period of time. And as soon as you take them out of that period of time, they die very quickly.

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.

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

Not my biggest fear, but my biggest problem onstage is over-emphasizing what I do. I'm pushing too hard. You need to engage an audience. They need to be able to involve their own imaginations as well. They don't need everything thrust down their throat, and I have a tendency to do that. I always have had a tendency to do that.

The body becomes the carrier for the work. It's not really about the physical body; it really becomes the apparatus that carries and moves the work. I don't really consider the body as much; I look at it as a tool.

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.

I have things that I'm interested in, and I'm not really interested in writing about anything that I'm not interested in. But it's important to me to be able to see it from a different perspective, and add something new to the whole picture.

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

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.

The reason I've gotten into script-writing, which was accidental to begin with, was that I found it was a far more effective medium for violence. Which is something that I'd always written in songs, but the violence always sat strangely within a song. And I was always interested in the way in which you listen to murder ballads and things like that - these weird lines would kind of come out, like, I drug her by the hair or something - that sat weirdly in the song. Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.

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.

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 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 love America. I really do. It's by far the place I like visiting out of anywhere in the world. I get a palpable sense of excitement when the plane's landing. It's a cliché, but there's still an incredible energy about New York in particular.

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.

I don't really care who collects my work, black, white, red, yellow. You have to also be consciously aware of, what does this mean in your home? And how are you supporting this work and the message behind the work?

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.

Out of sorrow entire worlds have been built out of longing great wonders have been willed they're only little tears darling let them spill and lay your head upon my shoulder.

Hamlet got a gun now.

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.

Said 2,000 years of Christian history, baby And you ain't learned to love me yet?

I've got some words of wisdom.

And she moves among the sparrows. And she floats upon the breeze. She moves among the flowers. She moves something deep inside of me

I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me.

God has matured. He is not the impulsive, bowel-less being of the Testaments - the vehement glory-monger, with His bag of cheap carny tricks and his booming voice - the fiery huckster with his burning bushes and his wonder wands. Nowadays God knows what He wants and He knows who He wants.

If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!

And I wish that I was made of stone So that I would not have to see A beauty impossible to define A beauty impossible to believe A beauty impossible to endure The blood imparted in little sips The smell of you still on my hands As I bring the cup up to my lips No God up in the sky No devil beneath the sea Could do the job that you did, baby Of bringing me to my knees

Into the mercy seat I climb My head is shaved, my head is wired And like a moth that tries To enter the bright eye I go shuffling out of life Just to hide in death awhile And anyway I never lied.

Love songs come in many guises and are seemingly written for many reasons – as declarations or to wound – I have written songs for all of these reasons – but ultimately the love songs exist to fill, with language, the silence between ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine.

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.

What I think about when I frequent the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], and I look at these artifacts that are taken out of context and how we're forced to view them as objects, as relics, as sculpture- static. But what's interesting is what it allows me to do in my head in terms of imagining what the possibilities are or imagining the role in which they played within a particular culture which I'm fascinated by.

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

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.

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.

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

I still feel very much an imposter in the whole music scene, which I'm quite happy about to be honest.

I think it's an essential fact for any performer or artist to fail as poignantly as they can succeed.

To sustain hatred is a very difficult thing to do, year after year. It's exhausting.

And I kissed away a thousand tears My lady of the Various Sorrows Some begged, some borrowed, some stolen Some kept safe for tomorrow.

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.

I'm hugely self-critical in the morning.

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.

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

You're one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan.

I am the captain of my pain.

A is for Answering all your prayers, N is for kNowing that your loverman's going to be the answer...

Sorrow's child grieves not what has passed, but all the past still yet to come.

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.

Do I personally believe in a personal God? No.

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

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

Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy.

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

If you're involved with imagination and the creative process, it's not such a difficult thing to believe in a God. But I'm not involved in any religions, and I've never intended to make religious records or records that preach some kind of point of view.

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.