When asked if Cave has trashed his hotel room yet: The room in this hotel isn't f**king worth trashing. Well, if you kicked over the ashtray you'd be trashing the room. It's so f**king dark in this hotel, I can't even find my room. It's like England during the blitz.

Cave on the bleakness drug addicted celebrities' experience: The only thing that's bleak about Amy Winehouse is that she's pursued by the media the whole time. Anyone who's a drug addict has these things going on. It's what happens. Everyone knows that. It's just particularly difficult because you have the whole of Middle England watching you do it. You can't go out the front door to score, or go into rehab, or whatever, without doing it publicly. It's really f**ked up. It's in no one's interest for them to get better. It's certainly not in the media's interest for Britney to, you know, suddenly come out and say, "Hey I'm alright!' They want to keep her as close to dead as they can. They don't want her to die of course. That would kill the golden calf. But it's a horrible indictment on the whole society.

Cave on turning down a nomination for MTV's Best Male Artist in 1996 by saying, "My muse is not a horse, and I am in no horse race, and if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel—this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes:" Well, these days I collect them. I got some f**king thing last night, the Plug Award or something.

On his lecture for the BBC, "The Flesh Made Word", you talk about the pressure "to be loathing everything all the time:"Sure, but then again, I made the f**king Boatman's Call. I'd like to see any f**king band these days create a more kind of generous, humble, spiritual, loving record than that. And vulnerable. I'd like to see the f**king Killers do that. These people are supposed to be kind of optimistic. Or, I don't know what they're supposed to be. But I personally feel that music is of huge value in the world. Of all the art forms, music is the one, you know? The one with the potential to do truly extraordinary things. And to me the great irony is that music is also the one thing that's losing its value. You've got people like Radiohead putting out records and saying, "You don't even have to f**king pay for it." They're basically saying music doesn't have any intrinsic value. And to me, it's the thing that has the potential to save the world in some kind of way, and it's being treated with complete disdain.

When asked if he has experienced any signs of a midlife crisis, Cave responded: I think I had several crises, but I was too stoned to recognize them.