Top 100 Quotes About Nick Cave
#1. I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.
Aleksandar Hemon
#2. Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave know best. Although I wear a lot of jeans, I've been told that Nick Cave doesn't own a pair and wouldn't be caught dead in denim.
Matt Berninger
#3. There are a few artists that I'm really into. I mean, I'm a big Nick Cave fan. And there's a band from Australia called Big Heavy Stuff that's one of my favorite bands ever.
J. Robbins
#4. The lyrics are different from Nick Cave songs and lyrics. His songs are very narrative.
Stephen Malkmus
#5. That's a real sign of the times - can you imagine Nick Cave wearing a hoodie? He may not wear one, but he definitely sells them.
Ian Astbury
#6. There Will Always Be Suffering
It Flows Through Life Like Water
Nick Cave
#7. I don't really do Japanese interviews. I don't think there's much call for me in Japan.
Nick Cave
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. No fish can swim until the King is born, until the King is born in Tupelo.
Nick Cave
#11. 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
#12. 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.
Nick Cave
#13. 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
#14. Wanting everything is the thing that eventually tears you apart.
Nick Cave
#15. 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
#16. Inspiration is a word used by people who aren't really doing anything.
Nick Cave
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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.
Nick Cave
#20. 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.
Nick Cave
#21. It's an Australian thing to be dismissive. We find that endearing. Americans don't. They believe what you say.
Nick Cave
#22. 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.
Nick Cave
#23. 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
#24. 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?'
Nick Cave
#25. 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.
Nick Cave
#26. I write songs from the point of view I had at a time;I'm not tryingto write songs from a young person's point of view.That only ends in disaster.
Nick Cave
#27. What we [outsiders] feel America is really about - the kind of crazed ravings of the Christian right - when it's probably something quite different.
Nick Cave
#28. And she moves among the sparrows. And she floats upon the breeze. She moves among the flowers. She moves something deep inside of me
Nick Cave
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. I've always had an obligation to creation, above all.
Nick Cave
#32. 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.
Nick Cave
#33. Oh, we will know, won't we?
The stars will explode in the sky
Oh, but they don't, do they?
Stars have their moment and then they die
Nick Cave
#34. Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.
Nick Cave
#35. I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don't like to get my knees dirty. I don't have a garden.
Nick Cave
#36. If you took love out of the equation, I wouldn't know what else to write about.
Nick Cave
#37. You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.
Nick Cave
#38. 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.
Nick Cave
#39. There's an element to songwriting that I can't explain, that comes from somewhere else. I can't explain that dividing line between nothing and something that happens within a song, where you have absolutely nothing, and then suddenly you have something. It's like the origin of the universe.
Nick Cave
#40. Songs you can dip in and out of, but a book ... well, it can overpower you.
Nick Cave
#41. But if you're gonna dine with them cannibals
Sooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten ...
Nick Cave
#42. I'm not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it's quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It's just full of all these open wounds we don't really know what to do with.
Nick Cave
#43. 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?
Nick Cave
#44. I think I have always had a pretty strong creative impulse. And that has probably saved me from abandoning myself completely.
Nick Cave
#45. I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god.
Nick Cave
#46. We sit at the gate and scratch, the gaunt fruit of passion.
Nick Cave
#47. If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!
Nick Cave
#48. 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.
Nick Cave
#49. Most of my ideals and stuff really come from my mother.
Nick Cave
#50. 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.
Nick Cave
#51. 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.
Nick Cave
#52. The actualising of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist.
Nick Cave
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you're in the middle of it
Nick Cave
#56. If you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.
Nick Cave
#58. I love being manipulated by what I see. I love weepies and romantic comedies where you're reaching for the Kleenex at the right moment.
Nick Cave
#59. He who seeks, finds, and who knocks, will be let in,
Nick Cave
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Do you hear what I hear, babe? Does it make you feel afraid?
Nick Cave
#63. 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.
Nick Cave
#64. 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
#65. Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.
Nick Cave
#66. I love performing. I can get to be that person I always wanted to be - godlike.
Nick Cave
#67. I think it's an essential fact for any performer or artist to fail as poignantly as they can succeed.
Nick Cave
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. I've always hated narrative songs. I hate those songs where, basically, it's an unfolding of a story.
Nick Cave
#73. 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
#74. Stars have their moments then they die.
Nick Cave
#75. I've got some words of wisdom.
Nick Cave
#76. Vagina man,' said Bunny, and his two colleagues went quiet and nodded in silent agreement.
Nick Cave
#77. Everything that's said against me offends me, whether it's true or not.
Nick Cave
#78. I'm a kind of hard-wired pessimist. I can't help but see the world in a certain kind of way.
Nick Cave
#79. 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.
Nick Cave
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. I write hate lyrics really well. It's not every day you can use them, really.
Nick Cave
#85. I don't feel I'm thrown around by the winds of taste and fashion.
Nick Cave
#86. You don't meet a lot of people that you really like. I don't anyway.
Nick Cave
#87. I've always felt like an imposter, in the whole, as a musician.
Nick Cave
#88. 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.
Nick Cave
#89. I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.
Nick Cave
#90. 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
#91. There are methods to creating a mayhem that sounds different from your usual mayhem. Because mayhem and a heavy drum backbeat end up sounding like Green Day or something. But if you put a different beat within it to create some air and lightness, the chaos comes through better.
Nick Cave
#92. I've spent my life butting my head against other people's lack of imagination.
Nick Cave
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. I'm a bad motherfucker, don't you know
and I'll crawl over fifty good pussies just to get to one fat boy's asshole, said Stagger Lee.
Nick Cave
#96. You can't trust an artist that just makes good records.
Nick Cave
#97. 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.
Nick Cave
#98. It's a wonderful life if you can find it.
Nick Cave
#99. You write a scene, and it works or it doesn't. It's immediate.
Nick Cave
#100. 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.
Nick Cave
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