Nick Quotes

I don't feel I'm thrown around by the winds of taste and fashion.

I feel very much a part of what I'm writing about, and I'm writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I'm not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean.

As Australians, we see the law as inherently bad. We have a real inherent distaste for authority in our makeup.

Being a parent can make you a horrible person at times, because you're pushed to the limit constantly.

We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, "Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?"

We are still struggling with people who don't feel comfortable going into museums. As a visual artist I ask how artists can be part of enacting a change.

L.A. is full of screenwriters. I don't know why. On many levels, it's such a thankless occupation.

Look, when I look back, from 20 onwards, I was actually having a pretty good time, I have to say.

Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life.

Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.

At the end, we're kind of observers - creative people, I mean. I feel like an observer, and I'm pretty much able to step out of things and see how things are playing out.

Do I personally believe in a personal God? No.

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

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

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

Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.

What you're really after when you see a film or listen to a song is a singular vision, and I'm not sure how much of that you really get in Hollywood.

That's what we [outsiders] feel America is really about - the kind of crazed ravings of the Christian right - when it's probably something quite different.

Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.

To my undying shame, I do read reviews. I don't read them all, but I like to get some kind of idea how things are going.

I see it as my duty in some way is to be out in the world as an Australian putting forward what I consider to be authentic Australian music.

I have a particular dislike for children's films. I'm way past the novelty aspect.

Jesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists - second rate Christianity.

That's what I like about watching a movie: you enter an imagined world that's more interesting, more engaging than your own. Or less painful than your own.

If you took love out of the equation, I wouldn't know what else to write about.

I have to be able to see the thing that's going on that I'm writing about, or else it just doesn't make any sense to me.

I don't really do Japanese interviews. I don't think there's much call for me in Japan.

I write hate lyrics really well. It's not every day you can use them, really.

The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write.

I don't know, maybe Australian humour isn't supposed to be funny. It's as dry as the Sahara, and I think people miss that.

I'm kind of old-school and love nothing more than sitting, opening a book, and reading it. But I also love listening to audio books.

I've always hated narrative songs. I hate those songs where, basically, it's an unfolding of a story.

The Liberal Democrats will add a heart to a Conservative government and a brain to a Labour one.

One thing I've very quickly learned is that if you wake up every morning worrying about what's in the press, you would go completely and utterly potty.

[All governments] get into a rut where every potentially good story turns into a bad one.

Every time [Chris Bryant] asks a question I become more and more baffled why anyone would want to hack his phone and listen to his messages

You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly, highly polarised. It's right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed.

After the economic 9/11, we will face a new world order.

Any government, of whatever composition, needs to mobilise opinion way beyond its own ranks in order to do the difficult things that it does.

What I hope is in five years' time, I can go to the British people in the election and say: Lots of you doubted that coalition politics worked, but it has worked.

[Ed Miliband]'s elevated personal abuse into a sort of strategy

I think that the days when newspaper barons could basically click their fingers and governments would snap to attention have gone.

I care more about getting this right [NHS reform] than I do about getting it done.

Whatever its other limitations, the Big Apple and those who live there make room for their dogs and cats, take good care of them and abide by the rules made necessary by a huge population.

America, the temple of invention and industry, doesn't make things anymore.

Social Security is at last on the nation's front burner.

We like to believe that, in our lifetime, the human condition is improving.

Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism.

The most successful people are those who are wildly enthusiastic about their work.

I think that the big age problem in the job market today is really on the part of employers and that they don't seem to be calculating the cost of age discrimination to them when they practice it.