Nick Cave Quotes

The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song.

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.

The roughest part for me when I'm writing a song is staring at a blank page. Where am I going from here? If you're a songwriter, you have to do that every time you start a song.

When you've got an extra gear in your head where that's all you do, you've constantly got a little radar up. ... And when something hits that strikes that beeper, hits that radar, it's like my song skills kick right in and go, 'Oh, OK, there's a song in that.' And then I start trying to figure it out.

Titles either come to you at the beginning or they don't come to you at all, I find, and I hate the feeling that I haven't got a title because it usually means that you are left at the end scrambling around trying to find something.

It's not like I wake up and songs flow out of me.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it's still a blank sheet of paper and you're still panicking like hell that you've got nothing new to say.

Sometimes I'll sing the same verse through the entire song, because the other verses aren't clicking. And when they do come to me, I'm in the middle of that same verse!

Creativity is always a leap of faith. You're faced with a blank page, blank easel, or an empty stage.

I keep a journal and just kind of take notes. I don't really so much sit down and write songs - I just take a lot of notes, and sometimes I sit down and put them all together.

I'll write lines or words in a notepad. You work on little things and little parts; sometimes they turn into bigger songs.

I think I need the demons in order to write, but the demons have gone. It bothers me a lot. I've tried and tried, but I just can't seem to find a melody.

I can't say that I'm always writing in my head but I do spend a lot of time in my head writing or coming up with ideas. And what I do usually is write the music and melody and then, you know, maybe the basic idea. But when I feel that I don't have a song or just say, God, please give me another song. And I just am quiet and it happens.

Sometimes, so much of the difficulty is the question of 'What am I going to write about?' because the world is so vast.

I write songs every day, but only a few of them get finished.

The first line of the song is always the hardest thing to write. And then after that, the song should - unless it sucks - it should write itself.

It's tough to know what I'm going to write about. I never really know until it starts happening.

It can take me many months to write one of my own songs.

Trying to write new music is definitely daunting, but I try not to overthink it.

When people ask me where I get my ideas, I lie. I tell them I draw inspiration from the news, the world, my dreams. Or I joke and say that I steal from other writers. I lie because I don't know where ideas come from, and I'm afraid if I look too hard, they'll stop coming.

For years and years, I would sit in my studio, and I wouldn't have any inspiration. I'd write one or two songs a year.

Most times, you walk into a room, and you don't really have a starting point. You have to create the starting point, and normally you'd do that by thinking of a title or a concept for a song, then working back from there.

The stressful time is the blank page at the beginning. When you're starting to see things being made flesh, and you're able to respond to that flesh, that's really exciting.

Songwriting was very tough for me... I would go in and sit and hope for inspiration to come, and it was rarely forthcoming.