Nick Cave

"The song is heroic because the song confronts death. The song is immortal and bravely stares down our own extinction. The song emerges from the spirit world with a true message: Some day I will tell you how to slay the dragon."

"Do you want to know how to write a song? Song-writing is about counterpoint. Counterpoint is the key. Putting two disparate images beside each other and seeing which way the sparks fly. Like letting a small child in the same room as, I don't know, a Mongolian psychopath or something, and just sitting back and seeing what happens. Then you send in a clown, say, on a tricycle, and again, you wait, and you watch ... And if that doesn't do it... you shoot the clown."

"Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite, it is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering."

"Do I personally believe in a personal God? No."

"God has matured. He is not the impulsive, bowelless being of the Testaments - the vehement glorymonger, with His bag of cheap carny tricks and his booming voice - the fiery huckster with his burning bushes and his wonder wands. Nowadays God knows what He wants and He knows who He wants."

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

"The actualising of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist."

"Of course I doubt [the existence of God], I would distrust anybody who didn't doubt. But I'm a believer. I have an understanding and belief in the divinity of things. It seems to me that people look at God in the wrong way. They think that God is there to serve them, but it's the other way around. God isn't some kind of cosmic bell-boy to be called upon to sort things out for us. It's important for us to realise that God has given us the potential to sort things out on our own."

"Oh, a passing, skeptical kind of interest. I'm a hammer-and-nails kind of guy."

"The concept of God in America is very different than it is in England. Because we see the horrendous outcome of religion as being an American thing, in which the name of God has been hijacked by a gang of psychopaths and bullies and homophobes, and the name of God has been used for their own twisted agendas. So that if you mention God, or a belief in God, in England, it's almost automatically associated with that kind of thinking. Religion's gotten a really bad name."

"Although I've never been an atheist, there are periods when I struggled with the whole thing. As someone who uses words, you need to able to justify your belief with language, I'd have arguments and the atheist always won because he'd go back to logic. Belief in God is illogical, it's absurd. There's no debate. I feel it intuitively, it comes from the heart, a magical place. But I still I fluctuate from day to day. Sometimes I feel very close to the notion of God, other times I don't. I used to see that as a failure. Now I see it as a strength, especially compared to the more fanatical notions of what God is. I think doubt is an essential part of belief."

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

"The brutality of the Old Testament inspired me, the stories and grand gestures. I wrote that stuff up and it influenced the way I saw the world. What I'm trying to say is I didn't walk around in a rage thinking God is a hateful god. I was influenced by looking at the Bible, and it suited me in my life vision at the time to see things in that way. .... After a while I started to feel a little kinder and warmer to the world, and at the same time started to read the New Testament."

"If you're involved with imagination and the creative process, it's not such a difficult thing to believe in a God. But I'm not involved in any religions, and I've never intended to make religious records or records that preach some kind of point of view."

"The thing about being young is that you think you're the final product of evolution. You are invincible. And nothing can hurt you. And people don't count. Ah, the solipsism of youth."

"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. But I wouldn't like to dwell on it. Perhaps you could lighten up a bit."

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

"My social conscience is fairly limited in a lot of ways; there's not much I'm angry about that doesn't affect me quite directly. But the prison system- not particularly capital punishment- but the penal system as it is, and the whole apparatus of judgement, people deciding on other people's fates... that does irritate, and upset me quite a lot. What angers me about the system goes beyond the unreliability of "proof"… it's that the way criminals are dealt with has nothing to do with rehabilitation and readjusting people who've stepped outside society's norms. The same goes for mental institutions and so forth. But it's also the very idea of someone being judged "criminal" or "insane" because they're unable to fit into what a corrupt society considers "social" or "sociable"."

"I think there's a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence."

"I'd rather see what makes me different as something almost congenital. And I have these inklings that what you commit or endure in this world, relates to some kind of justice or balance. Maybe if you get a bad deal in this world, it is because of something you did, or were, in a previous life. Which is why I don't feel sorry for the poor."

"'N is for Any'"

"Bunny takes another bite of his Big Mac and knows what everybody who is into this sort of things knows - that with its flaccid bun, its spongy meat, the cheese, the slimy little pickle and, of course, the briny special sauce, biting into a Big Mac is as close to eating pussy as, well, eating pussy."

"The boy watches his father cross the road and thinks there is something about the way his dad moves through the world that is truly impressive. Cars screech to a halt, drives shake their fists and stick their heads out the windows and curse and blow their horns and Bunny walks on as if radiating some super-human force field, like he has walked off the pages of a comic book. The world can't touch him. He seems to be the grand generator of some hyper-powerful electricity."

"The sound is beautiful, it's perfect! The sound of her young legs in stockings, The rhythm of her walk, it's beautiful! Just let it twist, let it break, Let it buckle, let it bend, I want to hear the noise of my Zoo-Music Girl."

"My body is a monster driven insane, My heart is a fish toasted in flames."

"Oh! God! Please let me die beneath her fists!"

"Nick the Stripper, Hideous to the eye, Hideous to the eye, He's a fat little insect, A fat little insect, And oooooooh! Here we go again."

"King Ink strolls into town... He sniffs around."

"Express thyself! Say something loudly! Aaaaaaah! What's in that room, Sonny?"

"King Ink feels like a bug, Swimming in a soup-bowl."

"Oh! Yer! What a wonderful life! Fats Domino on the radio!"

"Hit it! With words like Blood, Soldier and Mother..."

"I tried to kill it in my bed, I gagged it with a pillow, But awoke the nuns inside my head."

"Pilgrim gets 1 hacked daughter, And all we get are 40 hack reporters, Uptown 100 skirts are bleeding, And Mr. Evangilist says She's hit, ev'ry little bit."

"I am the king! I am the king! I am the king! One dead marine through the hatch, Scratch and scrape this heavenly body, Every inch of winning skin, Honey Honey Honey Honey Honey, come and kiss me-e-e-e-e-e!"

"My baby is alright, She doesn't mind a bit of dirt, She says 'Horror vampire bat bite, sex vampire, how I wish those bats would bite', Woooooah! Bite! Bite! Release the bats!"

"The Captain's fore-arm like buncht-up rope, With Anita wrigglin' free onto skull n' dagger, And a portrait of Christ, nailed to an anchor, Etched into the upper..."

"Tallys up his loneliness, notch by notch, For the sea offers nuthin' to hold or touch."

"Along crags and sunless cracks I go, Up rib of rock, down spine of stone, I dare not slumber where the right winds whistle, Lest her creeping-soul clutch this heart of thistle."

"Put ya shoulder to the handle, if ya dare, and hoist that bucket hither, Crank'n'hoist'n'hoist'n'crank, till ya muscles waste'n'wither."

"O the same God that abandon'd her, Has in turn abandon'd me, Deep in the Desert of Despair, I wait at the Well of Misery."

"O ah hear her walkin', Walkin' barefoot 'cross the floor-boards, All thru this lonesome night, And ah hear her crying too. Hot-tears come splashin' down, Leaking thru the cracks, Down upon my face, ah catch'em in my mouth!"

"Ah read her diary on her sheets, Scrutinizin' every lil' piece of dirt, Tore out a page'n'stufft it inside my shirt. Fled outa the window, And shinning it down the vine, Outa her night-mare, and back into mine."

"'O come to me!, O come to me!' is what the dirty city say to Huck."

"Straight in the arms of the city goes Huck, Down the beckonin' streets of op-po-tunity, Whistling his favorite river-song... And a bad-blind nigger at the piano puts a sinister blooo lilt into that sing-a-long, Huck senses something's wrong!"

"The mo-o-o-on, its huge cycloptic eye, Watches the city streets contract, twist and cripple and crack."

"O you recall the song ya used to sing-a-long, Shifting the river-trade on that ol' steamer, Life is but a dream!"

"When ya done ransackin' his room, Grabbin' any-damn-thing that shines, Throw the scraps down on the street, Like all his books and his notes. All his books and his notes and all the junk that he wrote, The whole fucken lot goes right up in smoke."

"Here is the hammer, that build the scaffold, and built the box..."

"From the words and the thickets, Come the ghosts of his victims, 'We love you!' 'Ah love you!' This will not hurt a bit."