For avid readers of Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files, they have seen how he doesn’t hold back on his thoughts and feelings about different topics.

So in his latest essay, Cave discusses how he has become so honest and also how he decides which fan questions to respond to.

Honesty is simply a declaration of one’s own vulnerability — it is its keen, bright edge — and my own vulnerability and the vulnerability of others became, in the end, a kind of shared armour,” he wrote in the piece. “I learned that, ultimately, our own truth and sense of self is all any of us have. We are enough, if we could only allow ourselves to be.”

Cave also pointed out how exhausting it is to “keep up with appearances.”

“Deception, artifice and keeping up appearances took up too much energy — I didn’t have the stamina for my own pretence and little patience for it in others,” he admited in the piece.

As for how he chooses which questions to answer, Cave revealed that he reads through about 50 questions every day and has been “an essential part of my daily work.”

Then when he’s ready to write a piece, he goes to through his file of questions and “the particular question always leeps out at me.”

“I feel at home among these questions, exalted and protected by them,” he wrote. “It is an absolute honour to be a part of this undertaking, whatever it is and wherever it may lead.”

Read Cave’s full essay here.