110+ Nick Cave Quotes On Dark, Brooding And Intense

Nick Cave is an Australian musician, singer-songwriter, author, screenwriter and occasional actor. He is best known as the frontman of the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1983, and for his intense, powerful live performances. He has also released 17 studio albums, with the most recent being Ghosteen, released in October 2019. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Nick Cave on love, life, dark.

Top 10 Nick Cave Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. It's a wonderful life if you can find it.
4. 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.
5. But if you're gonna dine with them cannibals Sooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten . . .
6. The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor.
7. People think I'm a miserable sod but it's only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror.

Nick Cave Short Quotes

• I am the captain of my pain.
• You can't trust an artist that just makes good records.
• To sustain hatred is a very difficult thing to do, year after year. It's exhausting.
• Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.
• Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy.
• Do I personally believe in a personal God? No.
• I've never been interested in being relevant.
• A is for Answering all your prayers, N is for kNowing that your loverman's going to be the answer.
• You're one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan.
• I can control the weather with my moods. I just can’t control my moods.

Nick Cave Quotes About Love

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

There's that kind of song, "Whoah baby, I love you," which doesn't have a visual element, but a very strong emotional element, and these are the great songs to me - those ones that you put them on and they just make you feel great, or whatever. — Nick Cave

Love is a state that I would like to exist in continuously. — Nick Cave

The actualising of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist. — Nick Cave

Said 2,000 years of Christian history, baby And you ain't learned to love me yet? — Nick Cave

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

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

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

I love America. I really do. It's by far the place I like visiting out of anywhere in the world. I get a palpable sense of excitement when the plane's landing. It's a cliché, but there's still an incredible energy about New York in particular. — Nick Cave

Nick Cave Quotes About Life

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

My records are basically a litany of complaints against the world, and I'm quite like that in real life as well. — Nick Cave

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

I've spent my life butting my head against other people's lack of imagination. — Nick Cave

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

Nick Cave Quotes About Write

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

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

I write songs in batches and then record them and then can't write again for ages. I try and build one song upon another, they may not obviously look inter-related but often one song acts as a springboard into another. — Nick Cave

I've always done a lot of research and stuff around the songs that I write so there are pages and pages of writing and you can kind of see these songs emerging. — Nick Cave

The way I go about writing records is that I make a calendar date to start the new record, so I have nothing. I don't have a bunch of notes that I bring into the office, I start with nothing at all. — Nick Cave

I'm unable to really write the kind of song that doesn't have a visual element, which most songs don't. — Nick Cave

The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write. — Nick Cave

I write songs from the point of view I had at a time;I'm not tryingto write songs from a young person's point of view.That only ends in disaster. — Nick Cave

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

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

Nick Cave Quotes About People

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

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

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

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

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

You don't meet a lot of people that you really like. I don't anyway. — Nick Cave

We are still struggling with people who don't feel comfortable going into museums. As a visual artist I ask how artists can be part of enacting a change. — Nick Cave

Nick Cave Quotes About Feel

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

That's what we [outsiders] feel America is really about - the kind of crazed ravings of the Christian right - when it's probably something quite different. — Nick Cave

I still feel very much an imposter in the whole music scene, which I'm quite happy about to be honest. — Nick Cave

Sound doesn't always have to be heard. Sound can also be created by how a pattern is set up on a surface- how it moves across the surface, how light reflects the surface [and] can generate a feeling. Sound can also be through feeling, through color, through texture. — Nick Cave

Everyone wants to feel that they matter. — Nick Cave

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

Nick Cave Famous Quotes And Sayings

Polly Jean, I love you. I love the texture of your skin, the taste of your saliva, the softness of your ears. I love every inch and every part of your entire body. From your toes and the beautifully curved arches of your feet, to the exceptional shade and warmth of your dark hair. I need you in my life, I hope you need me too. — Nick Cave

I don't particularly believe all love is doomed. But I guess, one is usually kinda suffering from some aborted love affair or association, rather than being at the peak of one. I think it's fairly obvious that a lot more suffering goes on in the name of love than the little happiness you can squeeze out of it. — Nick Cave

One thing that I'm really interested in is the kind of esoteric detail that surrounds these great figures. And Wikipedia is full of that kind of stuff, whether it's true or untrue. It staggers me: why, in the short space assigned to a person or an event, that kind of random information is there. To be honest, that's wonderful fuel for songwriting. — Nick Cave

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

It's very intuitive, the way that I approach my work. I only buy something that has a pulse. I may not know how I'm going to use it, but I know it has a pulse and it has multiple readings - if I shift it one way or another, it can be read this way or it can be read that way, but both readings are critical and very much ground the work. — Nick Cave

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

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

be mindful of the prayers you send pray hard but pray with care for the tears you are crying now are just your answered prayers letters of light we scale merrily, move mysteriously around so that when you think you're climbing up, man, in fact you're climbing down — Nick Cave

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

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

God has matured. He is not the impulsive, bowelless being of the Testaments - the vehement glorymonger, 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

Not my biggest fear, but my biggest problem onstage is over-emphasizing what I do. I'm pushing too hard. You need to engage an audience. They need to be able to involve their own imaginations as well. They don't need everything thrust down their throat, and I have a tendency to do that. I always have had a tendency to do that. — Nick Cave

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

It is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God...The love song is the sound of our endeavors to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre. — Nick Cave

I have to be able to pull you in. How can I diversify my audiences? What role do I have to play to be part of that shift? I have to take that seriously. — Nick Cave

Some are exploring the world through the subconscious. I've done that on occasions for various reasons, whether it be illness or self abuse, or whatever. Once things start to look grotesque I don't write them or sing them. I couldn't write them - making nightmares into living daylight...The minute it gets dark I shoot back, retreat. — Nick Cave

Love songs come in many guises and are seemingly written for many reasons – as declarations or to wound – I have written songs for all of these reasons – but ultimately the love songs exist to fill, with language, the silence between ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine. — Nick Cave

I don't believe in an interventionist God — Nick Cave

He who seeks, finds, and who knocks, will be let in. — Nick Cave

We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, "Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?" — Nick Cave

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

It was about the preciousness of that, and how they viewed those birds as art, as something valuable. I didn't care one way or another back then, but now, thinking about my grandparents - who are still alive but getting older - I see the birds as sort of time capsules. Now I go home during the holidays and they hold a lot of weight in terms of nostalgia and memory. Now they mean everything. — Nick Cave

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

I've had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn't really require you to sit down and work out what the story's about. You're brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it's kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It's taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out. — Nick Cave

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

Jesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists - second rate Christianity. — Nick Cave

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

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

I've got some words of wisdom. — Nick Cave

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

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

There are times when I think I can sing it better, but usually I find that I can't. — Nick Cave

As people buy less and less records, it's become more and more important for me to spend more and more on them - to lavish that much more attention on them. The Bad Seeds were always quite protective and old school, but Grinderman has opened us up to do anything and be shameless. We're not so precious about it. — Nick Cave

I think I have always had a pretty strong creative impulse. And that has probably saved me from abandoning myself completely. — Nick Cave

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

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

The editing of a song is largely what makes the song for me and I think that actually if I had started going like 'I want you to burn' it would have pinned that song down to a particular thing and made that song a smaller idea than what it is. By leaving that off it's much more open, broader. — Nick Cave

I'm a kind of hard-wired pessimist. I can't help but see the world in a certain kind of way. — Nick Cave

I think it's an essential fact for any performer or artist to fail as poignantly as they can succeed. — Nick Cave

The society of whores stuck needles in an image of me. — Nick Cave

No fish can swim until the King is born, until the King is born in Tupelo. — Nick Cave

Stars have their moments then they die. — Nick Cave

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

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

What I think about when I frequent the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], and I look at these artifacts that are taken out of context and how we're forced to view them as objects, as relics, as sculpture- static. But what's interesting is what it allows me to do in my head in terms of imagining what the possibilities are or imagining the role in which they played within a particular culture which I'm fascinated by. — Nick Cave

Your limitations make you the wonderful disaster you most probably are. — Nick Cave

And I wish that I was made of stone So that I would not have to see A beauty impossible to define A beauty impossible to believe A beauty impossible to endure The blood imparted in little sips The smell of you still on my hands As I bring the cup up to my lips No God up in the sky No devil beneath the sea Could do the job that you did, baby Of bringing me to my knees — Nick Cave

I’ve never intended to make religious records or records that preach some kind of point of view... 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. — Nick Cave

I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me. — Nick Cave

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

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

I don't like those songs where you have to listen to a story to get into them. I don't want to have to pay attention to music in that way, I just want it to hit me in the heart and do what music's supposed to do. — Nick Cave

Outside the world of politics, one person in the world of the arts I would mention as an influence is Nick Cave, another person who has been around since the late 1970s. He has developed and changed remarkably, whilst remaining true to his vision. He has been a great help to me as well, without his knowing it. — Nick Cave

Hamlet got a gun now. — Nick Cave

God is in everything whether I'm mentioning him or not. — Nick Cave

When you've been initiated, you can stand in the world differently. And I think it is up to all of us, we can have cheerleaders, we can have supporters, but it comes down to us as individuals, how do we now proceed? Do we have the tools to proceed? — Nick Cave

I have to be able to see the thing that's going on that I'm writing about, or else it just doesn't make any sense to me. — Nick Cave

Cynicism and defensiveness are two things constantly levelled at me. Look, I've got time for people, I'm good mannered. I usually find that when you're down, nobody has a bloody minute for you. If I was a nobody, you wouldn't even talk to me. People, in general, don't like you being upfront and civil. They hate you for it. They label you a cynic 'cos you're reasonable. — Nick Cave

Life Lessons by Nick Cave

1. Nick Cave's work demonstrates the power of creativity and the importance of staying true to yourself.
2. His lyrics often explore themes of love, death, and faith, showing that these topics can be explored in a meaningful and poetic way.
3. Nick Cave's music also shows the importance of collaboration, as he has worked with many different musicians throughout his career.