Nick Cave Quotes

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
Listen, ah don't wanna speak ill of the dead but have ah told you that mah mother was a great whopping whale of a cunt? Well she was precisely that - a great whopping whale of a hog's cunt with a dirty maggot for a brain.
Nick Cave
Then he smiles because he knows deep in his bones that his dad has gone and said something really funny probably. He kicks off his sheet and slides his feet into his slippers. Bunny sits in the living room, slumped low on the sofa, full of Geoffrey's Scotch and Poodle's cocaine.
Nick Cave
I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a God. It's kind of defending the indefensible, though; I'm critical of what religions are becoming, the more destructive they're becoming. But I think as an artist, particularly, it's a necessary part of what I do, that there is some divine element going on within my songs.
Nick Cave
But if you're gonna dine with them cannibalsSooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten . . .
Nick Cave
Memory is imagined; it is not real. Don't be ashamed of its need to create; it is the loveliest part of your heart. Myth is the true history. Don't let them tell you that there are no monsters. Don't let them make you feel stupid, just because you are happy to play down in the dark with your flashlight. The mystical world depends on you and your tolerance for the absurd. Be strong, my darling ones, and believe!
Nick Cave
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 the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world, a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you can hold on to that flame great things can be constructed around it that are massive and powerful and world changing – all held up by the tinniest of ideas.
Nick Cave
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.
Nick Cave
The boy will grow older, and over time there will be other songs – not many – ten or maybe twenty in a lifespan, that stand apart from the rest of the music he will discover. He will realise as he grows older still, and crosses the Canadian border and drives down into Seattle, that not only are these songs holy or sacred, they are hiding songs – what the Aztec Indians call carrion songs – that deal exclusively in darkness, obfuscation, concealment and secrecy. He will realize that, for him, the purpose of these songs has been to shut off the sun, to draw a long shadow down and protect him from the corrosive glare of the world.
Nick Cave
The boy will grow older, and over time there will be other songs – not many – ten or maybe twenty in a lifespan, that stand apar from the rest of the music he will discover. He will realise as he grows older still, and crosses the Canadian border and drives down into Seattle, that not only are these songs holy or sacred, they are hiding songs – what the Aztec Indians call carrion songs – that deal exclusively in darkness, obfuscation, concealment and secrecy. He will realize that, for him, the purpose of these songs has been to shut off the sun, to draw a long shadow down and protect him from the corrosive glare of the world.
Nick Cave
Out of sorrow entire worlds have been builtOut of longing great wonders have been willed
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
There are those who work so they can stop. Stopping is the why of work.There are those who stop so they can work.Working is the why of work.
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
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
I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Nick Cave