Nick Cave Quotes

In a clap-board shack with a roof of tin,
Where the rain came down and leaked within,
A young mother frozen on a concrete floor,
With a bottle and a box and a cradle of straw.

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.

The woods eats the woman and dumps her honey-body in the mud,
Her dress floats down the well and it assumes the shape of the body of a little girl,
Yeah, I recognize that girl,
She stumbled in some time last loneliness,
But I could not stand to touch her now,
My one and only onlyness.

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.

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.

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

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

A thousand Marys lured me,
To feathered beds and fields of glover,
Bird with crooked wing cast,
Its wicked shadow over,
A bauble moon did mock,
And trinket stars did smile,
Your funeral, my trial.

Cynicism is not a neutral position — and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils. I know this because much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent…

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like… keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

I just made a simple gesture,
They jumped up and nailed it to my shadow,
My gesture was a hooker,
You know, my shadow's made of timber.

And the mercy seat is melting,
And I think my blood is boiling,
And in a way I'm spoiling,
All the fun with all this truth and consequence.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,
And anyway I told the truth,
And I'm not afraid to die.

Punishment? Reward! Punishment? Reward!

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

Thrown into a dungeon,
Bread and water was my portion,
Faith - my only weapon,
To rest the devil's legion.
The speak-hole would slide open,
A viper's voice would pleade,
A voice think with innuendo,
Syphillis and greed.

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.