36 Quotes by Van Morrison
- My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that's what I'm doing.
- Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach.
- Skiffle was a name that was attached to what was, in essence, American folk music with a beat.
- It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.
- In order to win you must be prepared to lose sometime. And leave one or two cards showing.
- The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.
- If it's what you do and you can do it, then you do it.
- I've never felt like I was born with a silver spoon at all, although I've felt like howling at the moon a lot of times!
- If you're a pop singer, you don't need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.
- The future is keeping you out of the present time.
- The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.
- What you see is what you get.
- When I started you were more in touch with the people you were playing to. There wasn't the distance or the separation that there is now.
- You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.
- You've got to separate the singer and the songs.
- When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.
- These days politics, religion, media seem to get all mixed up. Television became the new religion a long time back and the media has taken over.
- I don't think nostalgia has to be negative.
- I'm not a rock singer and I don't want to be a rock singer. I'm not interested. It doesn't seem to get across.
- You can't stay the same. If you're a musician and a singer, you have to change, that's the way it works.
- A famous person to themselves, they don't get up in the morning and think, I'm famous. I'm not famous to me. Famous is a perception.
- As a developing musician, skiffle became a platform for me to start playing music.
- Being famous was extremely disappointing for me. When I became famous it was a complete drag and it is still a complete drag.
- Even today, skiffle is a defining part of my music. If I get the opportunity to just have a jam, skiffle is what I love to play.
- Every performance is different. That's the beauty of it.
- I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out.
- I educated myself. To me, school was boring.
- I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.
- I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.
- I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.
- I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn't mean anything to me.
- I think Paul McGuinness and U2 created the Irish music industry. It certainly wasn't there before that.
- I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.
- I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.
- I'd love to live in Ireland but I'd like to live as me, not what someone thinks I am. People don't understand - I lived there before I was famous.
- I do see value in music criticism. Most of the criticism I have received over the years has been very good.
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