I’m envious of people who don’t need that. There are people that just wander round the world and ideas fall down from wherever, and they sit and they strum a guitar one day and they write a song, and then they carry on living. I could never work in that way.
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Nick Cave
Songwriter, musician and novelist
Australia · b. 1957
Arts and letters
About
Australian songwriter and frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. His albums include The Boatman's Call, Push the Sky Away and Ghosteen, and he has written two novels and several screenplays. Since 2018 he has answered readers' questions in an online newsletter, The Red Hand Files.
4 answers
Many creative people, especially the young, may feel their chaotic or disordered relationship with the world is indispensable to their creative freedom. The more anarchic, the better! However, after considerable fieldwork in this area, I have yet to find it so. I have come to understand that the muscle of the imagination is strengthened through resistance, discipline and order.
The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor. […] As anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There’s a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.
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