Nick Cave

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

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

“At school I was an anti-magnet for women.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 just found this world a hard place to be good in,’ says Bunny, then he closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.”

“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.”

“No, I wouldn't direct a movie, no. I couldn't. I don't have the patience for it, I don't have the people skills. You have to be clever. I'm not really clever in that kind of way. And you have to be able to manipulate people, but at the same time allow them to feel like they are manipulating you, to get the kind of movie that you want.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Memory is imagined; it is not real. Don't be ashamed of its need to create; it is the loveliest part of your heart. Myth is the true history. Don't let them tell you that there are no monsters. Don't let them make you feel stupid, just because you are happy to play down in the dark with your flashlight. The mystical world depends on you and your tolerance for the absurd. Be strong, my darling ones, and believe!”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

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