quotes from classic

It's always a pleasure on a personal note for me to come back to Australia.

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

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I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.

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The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.

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I love performing. I can get to be that person I always wanted to be - godlike.

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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.

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I love rock-n-roll. I think it's an exciting art form. It's revolutionary. Still revolutionary and it changed people. It changed their hearts. But yeah, even rock-n-roll has a lot of rubbish, really bad music.

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I've always had an obligation to creation, above all.

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I've spent my life butting my head against other people's lack of imagination.

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Musicians are at the bottom of the creative pyramid and authors are at the top, and many people think it's unacceptable for someone to attempt to jump from the bottom to the top of the pyramid.

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The last thing I ever wanted to get involved with is Hollywood. The way it works is that people get an idea you could possibly do something, but there's a one-in-a-hundred chance that it could get made.

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If you're Australian, you feel it in your bones because you're at odds with everybody else, except other Australians, in the sense that people always seem to be behaving strangely. People always seem to be behaving the wrong way, in a different way. You say things and there are silences.

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When I perform onstage, I'm actually kind of nearsighted, so I don't have any real, true understanding of what the audience is like.

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When you're making a film, there are so many people involved that you get opinions and notes from people and you don't even know who they are. I find that quite difficult and it wears you down.

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I've always felt like an imposter, in the whole, as a musician.

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If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?'

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

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There's an element to songwriting that I can't explain, that comes from somewhere else. I can't explain that dividing line between nothing and something that happens within a song, where you have absolutely nothing, and then suddenly you have something. It's like the origin of the universe.

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I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god.

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I have a very strange relationship in general with women around my music. There's some that understand it and some that think there should be a law against it.

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