Top 252 Quotes & Sayings by Nick Cave - Page 5

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

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've had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn't really require you to sit down and work out what the story's about. You're brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it's kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It's taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out.

I have to be able to see the thing that's going on that I'm writing about, or else it just doesn't make any sense to me.

Jesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists - second rate Christianity.

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.

The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write.

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.

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

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

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