Quotes from Nick Cave

When you're talking about rock n' roll, myth-making is what it's all about.

Accessible local libraries are vital to communities and to children.

When you're on your own, you have all the self-censorship that everybody has when they try and write. All the little voices that say, 'No, you can't write that, what will they think of that?'

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.

When I perform onstage, I'm actually kind of nearsighted, so I don't have any real, true understanding of what the audience is like.

With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don't ever feel there's a font of ideas to fall back on.

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

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

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.

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

I always thought my records were number one; it's just the charts didn't think so.

People are always surprised to see clues to my being a normal kind of guy. As if I'm somehow letting the team down.

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.

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.

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.

The songs that I like are the ones that you can't visualize, that are just cries from the heart - those very straight, direct songs that make rock & roll music so wonderful.

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.

I am the captain of my pain.

I don't believe in an interventionist God

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

Do I personally believe in a personal God? No.

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

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

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?