Nick Cave Quotes

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

It takes me, like, half an hour to write the lyrics for a song. They just come out.

I usually start with a lyric and see where that takes me.

I've never had trouble finding inspiration for new songs, no matter what I'm doing.

Sometimes when I'm writing lyrics, it's a very loose train of thought, and wherever that takes me, I let it flow.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

I write when I have to; I write when the song is done and I deal with the idea and I just go with it and I'll become what that song is all about until I have finished it. And when you do that, it makes the song more visual, it makes it more personal.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

When I do write, it happens really easily. I'll just kind of sing along to whatever I'm playing, then find a line to build off of, then sit down and write. When I do write, I take care of business!

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

I find it very difficult to compose when I'm not playing.

I don't have any particular methodology, to tell you the truth. 'Silver Blue' took exactly the amount of time to write that it takes to sing it, and 'Prisoner in Disguise' took about a year and a half. So you just never know.

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

I was never a 'sit down with a notepad and write lyrics' kind of person.

Sometimes when I write songs, I don't know what they're about, and it just suddenly comes to me.

I don't know what the inspiration for most of songs really mean until I finish them. For the most part, I'm going for a visceral impression, and I write the words last.

It's hard to write music for specific things, because I'm always writing just to write.

I continually blacken pages and scribble away, so I always have a number of songs that are half-finished.

I used to do three or four songs a day, just write them - boom, boom, boom, and done - because of how spontaneous I was.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

I don't sit down to write a country song. I don't sit down to write a rap song. I just sit down to write a song, you know what I mean? And I try to make that song the best it can be.