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.
• There is no black-and-white situation. It's all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.
• There's always got to be a struggle. What else is there? That's what life is made of. I don't know anything else. If there is, tell me about it.
• 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.
• I'm very lucky, I'm happy with life because my experiences led me to do what I had to do. I don't have any regrets whatsoever.
• 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.
• Hearing the blues changed my life.
• 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 write songs. Then, I record them. And, later, maybe I perform them on stage. That's what I do. That's my job. Simple.
• 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.