Top 252 Quotes & Sayings by Nick Cave - Page 2

The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.

I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.

I won't go into the details, but I ready myself for the day. I am a high-maintenance type of guy.

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.

My muse is my wife. It's not some vague thing that flutters around the astrosphere or wherever it is. Sometimes as a songwriter you need something to hang a song on, to give it some kind of presence and form. For me, Susie is that.

I've always felt like an imposter, in the whole, as a musician.

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.

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

Everything that's said against me offends me, whether it's true or not.

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

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.

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

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.

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 love performing. I can get to be that person I always wanted to be - godlike.

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

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.

My records are basically a litany of complaints against the world, and I'm quite like that in real life as well.

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

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

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.

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

Most screen violence is tedious.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I always thought my records were number one; it's just the charts didn't think so.

Kylie Minogue is the greatest thing that has happened to Australian music.

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?'

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.

At school I was an anti-magnet for women.

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.

Songs you can dip in and out of, but a book... well, it can overpower you.

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

I'm a kind of hard-wired pessimist. I can't help but see the world in a certain kind of way.

Texting is apocalyptic on some level. It's a reduction of things.

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

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

I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.

If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?'

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 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'm a big fan of teatowels and am always on the lookout for a good one.