Top 180 Nick Cave Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

54. “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

55. “God is in everything whether I’m mentioning him or not.”

— Nick Cave

56. “Everyone loves a good boxing story, especially God.”

— Nick Cave

57. “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 the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world, a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you can hold on to that flame great things can be constructed around it that are massive and powerful and world changing – all held up by the tinniest of ideas.”

— Nick Cave

58. “Everybody tends to overplay live. That’s just the nature of playing live. And that can be great, but it can also kill something that’s special, and intimate, about a recorded version of a song. You find out very quickly which songs you can play, and which songs you do damage to by playing them live.”

— Nick Cave

59. “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.”

— Nick Cave

60. “Sorrow’s child grieves not what has passed, but all the past still yet to come.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

62. “The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

64. “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.”

— Nick Cave

65. “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.”

— Nick Cave

66. “Texting is apocalyptic on some level. It’s a reduction of things.”

— Nick Cave

67. “You’ve got to understand your limitations. It’s your limitations that make you the wonderful disaster you most probably are.”

— Nick Cave

68. “Brother, be a brother, fill this tiny cup of mine. And please, sir, make it whiskey: I have no head for wine!”

— Nick Cave

69. “I love rock-n-roll. I think it’s an exciting art form. It’s revolutionary. Still revolutionary and it changed people. It changed their hearts. But yeah, even rock-n-roll has a lot of rubbish, really bad music.”

— Nick Cave

70. “At some point you start seeing the difference between what you really want, and what is your priority order. I feel that today I know what I want. That’s the problem with perspective, as well as focus and concentration.”

— Nick Cave

71. “I’m not in the business of telling people what to do. I’m much more in the business of describing things, situations and stuff like that and leaving them out there, and you can make up your minds about them.”

— Nick Cave

72. “I’ve always worn suits. To me they’re a very practical kind of thing to wear. You put one on and don’t really have to think about what you’re going to wear.”

— Nick Cave

73. “And Satan sighed and shook his head, played harp amongst the flames. ‘It’s Hell up there in Heaven too, for all that that is worth. Heaven is just a lie of mine to make it Hell on Earth.”

— Nick Cave

74. “And she moves among the sparrows. And she floats upon the breeze. She moves among the flowers. She moves something deep inside of me.”

— Nick Cave

75. “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.”

— Nick Cave

76. “Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I’m a hammer-and-nails kind of guy.”

— Nick Cave

77. “In getting older, I find myself becoming progressively more ineffectual in a lot of different ways, and part of that is down to no longer having the youthful feeling that what you’re doing has any true impact.”

— Nick Cave

78. “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.”

— Nick Cave

79. “And I kissed away a thousand tears My lady of the Various Sorrows Some begged, some borrowed, some stolen Some kept safe for tomorrow.”

— Nick Cave

80. “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.”

— Nick Cave

81. “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.”

— Nick Cave

82. “No wonder sorrow doesn’t smile much. No wonder sadness is so sad.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

84. “If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!”

— Nick Cave

85. “My muse is my wife. It’s not some vague thing that flutters around the astrosphere or wherever it is. Sometimes as a songwriter you need something to hang a song on, to give it some kind of presence and form. For me, Susie is that.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

87. “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.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

89. “If you’re involved with imagination and the creative process, it’s not such a difficult thing to believe in a God. But I’m not involved in any religions, and I’ve never intended to make religious records or records that preach some kind of point of view.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

91. “It’s always a risky business inviting somebody on stage. You never know what they’re going to do. I try to avoid letting people join me onstage because it can be very distracting, and overly theatrical.”

— Nick Cave

92. “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.”

— Nick Cave

93. “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.”

— Nick Cave

94. “Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you’re in the middle of it.”

— Nick Cave

95. “The more settled I’ve become, the more problematic my characters have become. There was a period when I wrote sensitive and gentle songs and these came at a time when life was at its most destructive. I think you write about what you need, on some level.”

— Nick Cave

96. “It’s always a pleasure on a personal note for me to come back to Australia.”

— Nick Cave

97. “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.”

— Nick Cave

98. “I’ve got some words of wisdom.”

— Nick Cave

99. “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.”

— Nick Cave

100. “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!”

— Nick Cave