Top 180 Nick Cave Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Love is a state that I would like to exist in continuously.”

— Nick Cave

2. “Most people wait for the muse to turn up. That’s terribly unreliable. I have to sit down and pursue the muse by attempting to work.”

— Nick Cave

3. “The love song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness.”

— Nick Cave

4. “Your limitations make you the wonderful disaster you most probably are.”

— Nick Cave

5. “I’m very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It’s the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.”

— Nick Cave

6. “All of our days are numbered. We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all, because the worth of an idea never becomes apparent until you do it.”

— Nick Cave

7. “I want to write songs that are so sad, the kind of sad where you take someone’s little finger and break it in three places.”

— Nick Cave

8. “It’s a wonderful life if you can find it.”

— Nick Cave

9. “There’s always pain around. That’s one thing you can guarantee in life – there will always be a surplus of pain.”

— Nick Cave

10. “I am not interested in anything that doesn’t have a genuine heart to it. You’ve got to have soul in the hole. If that isn’t there, I don’t see the point.”

— Nick Cave

11. “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.”

— Nick Cave

12. “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.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

14. “A gentleman never talks about his tailor.”

— Nick Cave

15. “I can control the weather with my moods. I just can’t control my moods.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

17. “My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory.”

— Nick Cave

18. “You’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

20. “Out of sorrow entire worlds have been built out of longing great wonders have been willed they’re only little tears darling let them spill and lay your head upon my shoulder.”

— Nick Cave

21. “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.”

— Nick Cave

22. “I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts know it That you weren’t much of a muse, but then I weren’t much of a poet.”

— Nick Cave

23. “You don’t meet a lot of people that you really like. I don’t anyway.”

— Nick Cave

24. “The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor.”

— Nick Cave

25. “The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil.”

— Nick Cave

26. “Inspiration is a word used by people who aren’t really doing anything. I go into my office every day that I’m in Brighton and work. Whether I feel like it or not is irrelevant.”

— Nick Cave

27. “Into the mercy seat I climb My head is shaved, my head is wired And like a moth that tries To enter the bright eye I go shuffling out of life Just to hide in death awhile And anyway I never lied.”

— Nick Cave

28. “Death looms large I guess because it should. It’s the one thing that we as human beings from birth have a right to. It’s the only thing we’ve really got, and I don’t mean to sound bleak about this, but it’s a unifying factor amongst us all.”

— Nick Cave

29. “I don’t believe in an interventionist God.”

— Nick Cave

30. “I’ve spent my life butting my head against other people’s lack of imagination.”

— Nick Cave

31. “I’m hugely self-critical in the morning.”

— Nick Cave

32. “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.”

— Nick Cave

Featured in: Reading Quotes

33. “Rock music is the province of the young, and it should be made by young people. I’m not running around in a pair of spandex tights trying to reclaim my youth.”

— Nick Cave

34. “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.”

— Nick Cave

35. “I have things that I’m interested in, and I’m not really interested in writing about anything that I’m not interested in. But it’s important to me to be able to see it from a different perspective, and add something new to the whole picture.”

— Nick Cave

36. “It’s very important that the music has a sense of adventure to it, and that it’s done by the seat of your pants. There’s a kind of nervy element about it.”

— Nick Cave

37. “Hope is optimism with a broken heart.”

— Nick Cave

38. “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.”

— Nick Cave

39. “I suspect the older you get the more invisible you become.”

— Nick Cave

40. “The secret to longevity in the music business is to change, and to be able to change. An actor has to assume other people’s identities. A rock star doesn’t need to do that. But change is important.”

— Nick Cave

41. “Said 2,000 years of Christian history, baby And you ain’t learned to love me yet?”

— Nick Cave

42. “Hamlet got a gun now.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

44. “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.”

— Nick Cave

45. “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.”

— Nick Cave

46. “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.”

— Nick Cave

47. “I’m not a misogynist, so you can dispense with that. I think I’ve done wonders for the feminist movement.”

— Nick Cave

48. “No fish can swim until the King is born, until the King is born in Tupelo.”

— Nick Cave

49. “Buddy, you’ve been warned.”

— Nick Cave

50. “Do you want to know how to write a song? Songwriting is about counterpoint. Counterpoint is the key. Putting two disparate images beside each other and seeing which way the sparks fly. Like letting a small child in the same room as, I don’t know, a Mongolian psychopath or something, and just sitting back and seeing what happens. Then you send in a clown, say, on a tricycle and again you wait and you watch. And if that doesn’t do it, you shoot the clown.”

— Nick Cave