Top 180 Nick Cave Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don’t like to get my knees dirty. I don’t have a garden.”

— Nick Cave

152. “There are times when I think I can sing it better, but usually I find that I can’t.”

— Nick Cave

153. “A is for Answering all your prayers, N is for kNowing that your loverman’s going to be the answer...”

— Nick Cave

154. “I’m always sort of looking for projects that I can sort of put out into the world, into the public sphere, and to somehow cause an effect. I want to be able to create projects that sort of are going to make people think and think in this sort of magical, sort of fantastical way.”

— Nick Cave

155. “Wanting everything is the thing that eventually tears you apart.”

— Nick Cave

156. “I still feel very much an imposter in the whole music scene, which I’m quite happy about to be honest.”

— Nick Cave

157. “Well, as anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There’s a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.”

— Nick Cave

158. “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.”

— Nick Cave

159. “Most screen violence is tedious.”

— Nick Cave

160. “Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.”

— Nick Cave

161. “You write a scene, and it works or it doesn’t. It’s immediate.”

— Nick Cave

162. “Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life.”

— Nick Cave

163. “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.”

— Nick Cave

164. “Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.”

— Nick Cave

165. “Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.”

— Nick Cave

166. “I don’t write happy songs. Who does? I don’t know anybody who writes happy songs, really.”

— Nick Cave

167. “This is how it essentially is for Bunny Junior. He loves his dad. He thinks there is no dad better, cleverer, or more capable, and he stands there beside him with a sense of pride – he’s my dad – and he also, of course, stands beside him because he has nowhere else to go.”

— Nick Cave

168. “I don’t really care who collects my work, black, white, red, yellow. You have to also be consciously aware of, what does this mean in your home? And how are you supporting this work and the message behind the work?”

— Nick Cave

169. “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.”

— Nick Cave

170. “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.”

— Nick Cave

171. “I get criticized for a lot of what I write about, but as far as I’m concerned I’m actually standing up and having a look at what goes on in the minds of men, and I have the authority to talk about it because I’m a man.”

— Nick Cave

172. “I think there is a certain perversity in my music in that I continue, you know, to eat at the same ball of vomit year after year.”

— Nick Cave

173. “That’s what I like about watching a movie: you enter an imagined world that’s more interesting, more engaging than your own. Or less painful than your own.”

— Nick Cave

174. “I have a particular dislike for children’s films. I’m way past the novelty aspect.”

— Nick Cave

175. “I don’t feel I’m thrown around by the winds of taste and fashion.”

— Nick Cave

176. “I don’t think Hollywood makes many good films anymore. How many directors can you really trust to have an artistic vision, not a corporate vision or a watered-down communal one?”

— Nick Cave

177. “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.”

— Nick Cave

178. “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.”

— Nick Cave

179. “As Australians, we see the law as inherently bad. We have a real inherent distaste for authority in our makeup.”

— Nick Cave

180. “Vulnerability is essential to spiritual and creative growth. Finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. The two are connected, maybe – vulnerability and freedom.”

— Nick Cave

181. “The more overtly unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and the not-questioning can sometimes be accompanied by an attitude of moral superiority. The belligerent dogmatism of the current cultural moment is a case in point. A bit of humility wouldn’t go astray.”

— Nick Cave