Top 100 Nick Cave Quotes
#1. There Will Always Be Suffering
It Flows Through Life Like Water
Nick Cave
#2. 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.
Nick Cave
#3. Listen, ah don't wanna speak ill of the dead but have ah told you that mah mother was a great whopping whale of a cunt? Well she was precisely that - a great whopping whale of a hog's cunt with a dirty maggot for a brain.
Nick Cave
#4. 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.
Nick Cave
#5. 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.
Nick Cave
#6. 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.
Nick Cave
#7. 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.
Nick Cave
#8. 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.
Nick Cave
#9. It's an Australian thing to be dismissive. We find that endearing. Americans don't. They believe what you say.
Nick Cave
#10. 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.
Nick Cave
#11. 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.
Nick Cave
#12. 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.
Nick Cave
#13. I've always had an obligation to creation, above all.
Nick Cave
#14. I think I have always had a pretty strong creative impulse. And that has probably saved me from abandoning myself completely.
Nick Cave
#15. If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!
Nick Cave
#16. 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.
Nick Cave
#17. Sound doesn't always have to be heard. Sound can also be created by how a pattern is set up on a surface- how it moves across the surface, how light reflects the surface [and] can generate a feeling. Sound can also be through feeling, through color, through texture.
Nick Cave
#18. Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you're in the middle of it
Nick Cave
#19. If you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.
Nick Cave
#20. He who seeks, finds, and who knocks, will be let in,
Nick Cave
#21. 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.
Nick Cave
#22. 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.
Nick Cave
#23. Do you hear what I hear, babe? Does it make you feel afraid?
Nick Cave
#24. I'm forever near a stereo saying, 'What the fuck is this garbage?' And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Nick Cave
#25. I love performing. I can get to be that person I always wanted to be - godlike.
Nick Cave
#26. 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.
Nick Cave
#27. 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.
Nick Cave
#28. 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.
Nick Cave
#29. Get down, get down, little Henry Lee
And stay all night with me
You won't find a girl in this damn world
That will compare with me
And the wind did howl and the wind did blow
La la la la la
La la la la lee
A little bird lit down on Henry Lee ...
Nick Cave
#30. 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.
Nick Cave
#31. I've got some words of wisdom.
Nick Cave
#32. I'm a kind of hard-wired pessimist. I can't help but see the world in a certain kind of way.
Nick Cave
#33. 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.
Nick Cave
#34. And I kissed away a thousand tears My lady of the Various Sorrows Some begged, some borrowed, some stolen Some kept safe for tomorrow.
Nick Cave
#35. 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.
Nick Cave
#36. I write hate lyrics really well. It's not every day you can use them, really.
Nick Cave
#37. I don't feel I'm thrown around by the winds of taste and fashion.
Nick Cave
#38. 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.
Nick Cave
#39. What I'm resistant to is the 'Walk the Line' biopic, where you have this redemptive life done in two hours. It just doesn't wash with me. I've been there and things don't work out that way.
Nick Cave
#40. Samuel: What's a misanthrope?
Two Bob: A misanthrope is a bugger who hates every other bugger.
Samuel: Are we misanthropes?
Arthur: Lord no! We're family.
Nick Cave
#41. You write a scene, and it works or it doesn't. It's immediate.
Nick Cave
#42. Sorrow's child grieves not what has passed
But all the past still yet to come ...
Nick Cave
#43. 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.
Nick Cave
#44. I think there is a certain perversity in my music in that I continue, you know, to eat at the same ball of vomit year after year.
Nick Cave
#45. 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.
Nick Cave
#46. My true intent is all for your delight.
Nick Cave
#47. 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.
Nick Cave
#48. My records are basically a litany of complaints against the world, and I'm quite like that in real life as well.
Nick Cave
#49. God is in everything whether I'm mentioning him or not.
Nick Cave
#50. At school I was an anti-magnet for women.
Nick Cave
#51. I have a particular dislike for children's films. I'm way past the novelty aspect.
Nick Cave
#52. Then he smiles because he knows deep in his bones that his dad has gone and said something really funny probably. He kicks off his sheet and slides his feet into his slippers. Bunny sits in the living room, slumped low on the sofa, full of Geoffrey's Scotch and Poodle's cocaine.
Nick Cave
#53. I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts babe we know it, that you weren't much of a muse, but then, I weren't much of a poet.
Nick Cave
#54. The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor.
Nick Cave
#55. Well, I said, if the past don't get you, the fucking future sure will.
Nick Cave
#56. To me, I don't write when I'm depressed. If I'm depressed, which is actually rare, I'm not doing anything, you know, and I'm not able to do anything.
Nick Cave
#57. Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.
Nick Cave
#58. 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.
Nick Cave
#59. 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.
Nick Cave
#60. Personally I find the story of Christ incredibly moving.
Nick Cave
#61. I've always been at war with the guitar. All vocalists are fighting a war with the electric rhythm guitar.
Nick Cave
#62. am the guy with the flies. I am the one that dies.
Nick Cave
#63. I think there's a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence.
Nick Cave
#64. Texting is apocalyptic on some level. It's a reduction of things.
Nick Cave
#65. 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.
Nick Cave
#66. 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.
Nick Cave
#67. I've never been interested in being relevant.
Nick Cave
#68. A rock musician's career is short-lived. To extend it, you need to do other things to keep yourself fresh.
Nick Cave
#69. 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.
Nick Cave
#70. And Satan sighed and shook his head, played harp amongst the flames. 'It's Hell up there in Heaven too, for all that that is worth. Heaven is just a lie of mine to make it Hell on Earth.
Nick Cave
#71. People think I'm a miserable sod but it's only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.
Nick Cave
#72. My father was a teacher and my mother also worked in the school, so the family has a background in education.
Nick Cave
#73. My responsibility as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God.
Nick Cave
#74. 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.
Nick Cave
#75. Most screen violence is tedious.
Nick Cave
#76. 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.
Nick Cave
#77. Do I personally believe in a personal God? No.
Nick Cave
#78. Said 2,000 years of Christian history, baby
And you ain't learned to love me yet?
Nick Cave
#79. 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.
Nick Cave
#80. Mummy was a swine: a scum-cunted, likkered-up, brain-sick swine. She was lazy and slothful and dirty and belligerent and altogether evil. Ma was a soak - a drunk - a piss-eyed hell-bag with a taste for the homebrew.
Nick Cave
#81. A is for Answering all your prayers, N is for kNowing that your loverman's going to be the answer ...
Nick Cave
#82. 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.
Nick Cave
#83. The older I get, the more I feel those kinds of ghosts - especially the women in my life - moving out of the shadows a bit more and becoming more present in my life.
Nick Cave
#84. It's very important that the music has a sense of adventure to it, and that it's done by the seat of your pants. There's a kind of nervy element about it.
Nick Cave
#85. 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.
Nick Cave
#86. Love is a state that I would like to exist in continuously.
Nick Cave
#87. Look, when I look back, from 20 onwards, I was actually having a pretty good time, I have to say.
Nick Cave
#88. It's always a pleasure on a personal note for me to come back to Australia.
Nick Cave
#89. Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.
Nick Cave
#90. I always thought my records were number one; it's just the charts didn't think so.
Nick Cave
#91. No wonder sorrow doesn't smile much. No wonder sadness is so sad.
Nick Cave
#92. Comatose, Pa's wife, the slobstress, buried an armchair beneath her bulk.
Nick Cave
#93. I would hate to think my songs were giving advice to people.
Nick Cave
#94. 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.
Nick Cave
#95. My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory.
Nick Cave
#96. 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.
Nick Cave
#97. 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.
Nick Cave
#98. 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.
Nick Cave
#99. I think it's a part of us as human beings that we search outside of ourselves for meaning.
Nick Cave
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