Quotes from 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.

If beautiful movies can influence you to go out and hug your children, then we have to be honest and say that other movies can inspire you to do bad things.

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

I think it's a part of us as human beings that we search outside of ourselves for meaning.

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.

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

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.

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

Most of my ideals and stuff really come from my mother.

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.

You write a scene, and it works or it doesn't. It's immediate.

Personally I find the story of Christ incredibly moving.

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.

I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.

I'm not someone who's particularly in touch with the way they feel. I've heard it said that you should be a 'human being' not a 'human doing', but I'm a human doing, very much so.

I love performing. I can get to be that person I always wanted to be - godlike.

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.

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

If you're Australian, you feel it in your bones because you're at odds with everybody else, except other Australians, in the sense that people always seem to be behaving strangely. People always seem to be behaving the wrong way, in a different way. You say things and there are silences.

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.

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.

The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.

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.

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.