Nick Cave
I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don't like to get my knees dirty. I don't have a garden.Collection: Gardening
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.Collection: Wedding
The work ethic at art school is completely different than the work ethic amongst people who get into music. People who paint, it's an honorable thing to spend all day and all night in front of your canvas - that is the romantic vision of the painter.Collection: Romantic
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.Collection: Romantic
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.Collection: Romantic
I've spent my life butting my head against other people's lack of imagination.Collection: Imagination
My father was a teacher and my mother also worked in the school, so the family has a background in education.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Patience
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.Collection: Funny
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've always felt like an imposter, in the whole, as a musician.
I always thought my records were number one; it's just the charts didn't think so.
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?'
It's always a pleasure on a personal note for me to come back to Australia.
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.
Most screen violence is tedious.
Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life.
Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.
Accessible local libraries are vital to communities and to children.
If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?'
People are always surprised to see clues to my being a normal kind of guy. As if I'm somehow letting the team down.
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.
I don't feel I'm thrown around by the winds of taste and fashion.
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.
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.
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 don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.
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.
The more information you have, the more human our heroes become and consequently the less mysterious and godlike. They need to be godlike.
As Australians, we see the law as inherently bad. We have a real inherent distaste for authority in our makeup.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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've always hated narrative songs. I hate those songs where, basically, it's an unfolding of a story.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At school I was an anti-magnet for women.
My records are basically a litany of complaints against the world, and I'm quite like that in real life as well.
I write hate lyrics really well. It's not every day you can use them, really.