Top 180 Nick Cave Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.”

— Nick Cave

103. “I think there’s a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence.”

— Nick Cave

104. “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.”

— Nick Cave

105. “My true intent is all for your delight.”

— Nick Cave

106. “Songs need to have the ability to change and to grow for sure. They take on lives of their own. Some songs just don’t have that capacity. They’re locked within a period of time. And as soon as you take them out of that period of time, they die very quickly.”

— Nick Cave

107. “I’ve always had an obligation to creation, above all.”

— Nick Cave

108. “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.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

110. “I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can’t really find a way to change those things.”

— Nick Cave

111. “The older I get, the more I feel those kinds of ghosts – especially the women in my life – moving out of the shadows a bit more and becoming more present in my life.”

— Nick Cave

112. “I’m not religious, and I’m not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god.”

— Nick Cave

113. “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.”

— Nick Cave

114. “God has matured. He is not the impulsive, bowel-less being of the Testaments – the vehement glory-monger, with His bag of cheap carny tricks and his booming voice – the fiery huckster with his burning bushes and his wonder wands. Nowadays God knows what He wants and He knows who He wants.”

— Nick Cave

115. “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.”

— Nick Cave

116. “It’s an Australian thing to be dismissive. We find that endearing. Americans don’t. They believe what you say.”

— Nick Cave

117. “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.”

— Nick Cave

118. “Sometimes the song isn’t strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

120. “I’ve always hated narrative songs. I hate those songs where, basically, it’s an unfolding of a story.”

— Nick Cave

121. “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.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

123. “A rock musician’s career is short-lived. To extend it, you need to do other things to keep yourself fresh.”

— Nick Cave

124. “I’m not religious, and I’m not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a God. It’s kind of defending the indefensible, though; I’m critical of what religions are becoming, the more destructive they’re becoming. But I think as an artist, particularly, it’s a necessary part of what I do, that there is some divine element going on within my songs.”

— Nick Cave

125. “I look down at the city again. From here the city resembles a severed head, incinerated and discarded by the side of the river; its cavernous eye sockets are empty, bundles of dead nerves dangle from its neck, its shattered mouth gapes, a few desolate wires hang from its stark, scorched skull and, suddenly and incomprehensibly and so foreign to my body I could weep, I feel my heart expand with what I can only describe as a sensation of hope. Is there a word for that? Hope in the face of grand calamity.”

— Nick Cave

126. “I love performing. I can get to be that person I always wanted to be – godlike.”

— Nick Cave

127. “I think I have always had a pretty strong creative impulse. And that has probably saved me from abandoning myself completely.”

— Nick Cave

128. “I write hate lyrics really well. It’s not every day you can use them, really.”

— Nick Cave

129. “Found in a small stone cave bitten from the roadside, stitchless save for his great outsized boots and a plague of flies, fat on the human scrappage of dinners long past, Toad squatted in the slitted stomach of a warm child, eating loudly the face of her hapless, headless father, who sat a good foot off the ground impaled up the ass on a pointed post.”

— Nick Cave

130. “Who knows their own story? Certainly it makes no sense when we are living in the midst of it. It’s all just clamor and confusion. It only becomes a story when we tell it and retell it. Our small precious recollections that we speak again and again to ourselves and to others, first creating the narrative of our lives and then keeping the story from dissolving into darkness.”

— Nick Cave

131. “Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer’s block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I’m projecting here.”

— Nick Cave

132. “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.”

— Nick Cave

133. “The body becomes the carrier for the work. It’s not really about the physical body; it really becomes the apparatus that carries and moves the work. I don’t really consider the body as much; I look at it as a tool.”

— Nick Cave

134. “I feel very much a part of what I’m writing about, and I’m writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I’m not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean.”

— Nick Cave

135. “Humming softly with the child asleep in his arms, Sardus Swift looked to the winking stars and saw the moon – a smirk on the face of heaven – as he made his way home.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

137. “To sustain hatred is a very difficult thing to do, year after year. It’s exhausting.”

— Nick Cave

138. “My records are basically a litany of complaints against the world, and I’m quite like that in real life as well.”

— Nick Cave

139. “You’re collaborating with people you don’t even know, when you’re making a film. You’re collaborating with people you’ve never seen. So, the collaborative process is very, very different than when you’re collaborating on a record with the musicians you’ve worked with all your life.”

— Nick Cave

140. “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.”

— Nick Cave

141. “I think it’s an essential fact for any performer or artist to fail as poignantly as they can succeed.”

— Nick Cave

142. “Ah knew his eyes were blue and though his face seemed rugged, even swarthy in the sepia tones of the photograph, it was obvious that the sea and salt had been instrumental in darkening what was once a pale and bloodless complexion – like mine.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

144. “There are methods to creating a mayhem that sounds different from your usual mayhem. Because mayhem and a heavy drum backbeat end up sounding like Green Day or something. But if you put a different beat within it to create some air and lightness, the chaos comes through better.”

— Nick Cave

145. “I saw a sick man pick up his instrument and be well.”

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

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

— Nick Cave

148. “Accessible local libraries are vital to communities and to children.”

— Nick Cave

149. “My responsibility as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God.”

— Nick Cave

150. “When I’m singing ‘Deanna,’ for example, which I sing pretty much every night, it brings forward a kind of imagined, romanticized lie about this particular person, which I find really comforting and exciting to sing about.”

— Nick Cave