408 Quotes by Nick Cave

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Being a parent can make you a horrible person at times, because you’re pushed to the limit constantly.