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
Guns are part of the American psyche, aren’t they? This is collateral damage for having a Wild West mentality. It’s intrinsic to the American psyche. It’s never going to change. – Nick Cave
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. – Nick Cave
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
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. – Nick Cave
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
The problem with books, now that I’ve written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new. – Nick Cave
L.A. is full of screenwriters. I don’t know why. On many levels, it’s such a thankless occupation. – Nick Cave
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. – Nick Cave
Most people wait for the muse to turn up. That’s terribly unreliable. I have to sit down and pursue the muse by attempting to work. – Nick Cave
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
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. – Nick Cave
I don’t have any authority to talk about the domestic policies of America. But as an outsider, I am mystified by the fact that you are encouraged to buy a gun, but if you use it for the purpose that it is expressly designed for, you get the death penalty. That aspect of America is kind of mystifying. – Nick Cave
There’s always pain around. That’s one thing you can guarantee in life – there will always be a surplus of pain. – Nick Cave
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. – Nick Cave
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?’ – Nick Cave
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
I’m kind of old-school and love nothing more than sitting, opening a book, and reading it. But I also love listening to audio books. – Nick Cave
As Australians, we see the law as inherently bad. We have a real inherent distaste for authority in our makeup. – Nick Cave
