Top 77 Nick Cave Quotes

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

I’m hugely self-critical in the morning.

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.

If you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.

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

It’s possible to get through life without a religious structure, but I don’t think that’s a very fruitful way to live.

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

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

It’s possible to get through life without a religious structure, but I don’t think that’s a very fruitful way to live.

Musicians are at the bottom of the creative pyramid and authors are at the top, and many people think it’s unacceptable for someone to attempt to jump from the bottom to the top of the pyramid.

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

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.

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.

I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don’t like to get my knees dirty. I don’t have a garden.

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.

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

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 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.

When I perform onstage, I’m actually kind of nearsighted, so I don’t have any real, true understanding of what the audience is like.

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.

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

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

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’ve always had an obligation to creation, above all.

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

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

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.

I’ve always been at war with the guitar. All vocalists are fighting a war with the electric rhythm guitar.

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

I’m an Australian, and when I grew up much of my influences were American – blues music and country music, all that sort of thing.

People think I’m a miserable sod but it’s only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.

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.

An artist’s duty is rather to stay open-minded and in a state where he can receive information and inspiration. You always have to be ready for that little artistic Epiphany.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Being a parent can make you a horrible person at times, because you’re pushed to the limit constantly.

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.

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.

You write a scene, and it works or it doesn’t. It’s immediate.

Despite what people might think, I’m not interested in being dark all the time. I’m actually searching for some kind of light, and I’m always very happy when I can achieve that.

I don’t have any authority to talk about the domestic policies of America. But as an outsider, I am mystified by the fact that you are encouraged to buy a gun, but if you use it for the purpose that it is expressly designed for, you get the death penalty. That aspect of America is kind of mystifying.

I would hate to think my songs were giving advice to people.

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.

Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.

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.

Most of my ideals and stuff really come from my mother.

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.

‘Inspiration’ is a word used by people who aren’t really doing anything.

I don’t think Hollywood makes many good films anymore. How many directors can you really trust to have an artistic vision, not a corporate vision or a watered-down communal one?

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. What do I write about? I never know.

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

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.

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

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

A gentleman never talks about his tailor.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.