Van Morrison Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by Van Morrison:
You learn to read the audiences after a while, and there are all different kinds of gigs.
~Van Morrison
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My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that's what I'm doing.
~Van Morrison
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In order to win you must be prepared to lose sometime. And leave one or two cards showing.
~Van Morrison
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If it's what you do and you can do it, then you do it.
~Van Morrison
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Music is spiritual. The music business is not.
~Van Morrison
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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.
~Van Morrison
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My records do not require a lot of thought of 'What is this?' and 'What is that?' That would be too contrived for me.
~Van Morrison
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I think when you get past your second album, it all becomes something of a routine. So you have to struggle against that, find a way of making what you do sound fresh and new each time.
~Van Morrison
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I don't feel comfortable doing interviews. My profession is music, and writing songs. That's what I do. I like to do it, but I hate to talk about it.
~Van Morrison
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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.
~Van Morrison
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I deliberately try not to cater for the commercial market, so I can't see myself in competition, you know, with second or third generation rock stars.
~Van Morrison
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I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.
~Van Morrison
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You can't stay the same. If you're a musician and a singer, you have to change, that's the way it works.
~Van Morrison
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Hearing the blues changed my life.
~Van Morrison
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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.
~Van Morrison
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I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out.
~Van Morrison
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I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.
~Van Morrison
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I educated myself. To me, school was boring.
~Van Morrison
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Every performance is different. That's the beauty of it.
~Van Morrison
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I do see value in music criticism. Most of the criticism I have received over the years has been very good.
~Van Morrison
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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.
~Van Morrison
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My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.
~Van Morrison
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I don't think nostalgia has to be negative.
~Van Morrison
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I put out records to this day that are not necessarily in a sequence of anything. Some could be written a while back, some not. There is no set pattern.
~Van Morrison
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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.
~Van Morrison
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The future is keeping you out of the present time.
~Van Morrison
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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.
~Van Morrison
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I think Paul McGuinness and U2 created the Irish music industry. It certainly wasn't there before that.
~Van Morrison
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You've got to separate the singer and the songs.
~Van Morrison
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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.
~Van Morrison
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Skiffle was a name that was attached to what was, in essence, American folk music with a beat.
~Van Morrison
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For a long time, I couldn't actually deal with playing concerts; it was a totally alien concept to me, 'cause I was used to playing in clubs and dance halls.
~Van Morrison
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As a developing musician, skiffle became a platform for me to start playing music.
~Van Morrison
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Being famous was extremely disappointing for me. When I became famous it was a complete drag and it is still a complete drag.
~Van Morrison
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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.
~Van Morrison
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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.
~Van Morrison
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The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.
~Van Morrison
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There is no black-and-white situation. It's all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.
~Van Morrison
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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.
~Van Morrison
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It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.
~Van Morrison
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Singing is my profession - there is no plan B.
~Van Morrison
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I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music.
~Van Morrison
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I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.
~Van Morrison
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What you see is what you get.
~Van Morrison
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A lot of people who were writing when I came through originally as a singer-songwriter have disappeared.
~Van Morrison
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I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn't mean anything to me.
~Van Morrison
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Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach.
~Van Morrison
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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!
~Van Morrison
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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.
~Van Morrison
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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.
~Van Morrison
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You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.
~Van Morrison
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I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.
~Van Morrison
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The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.
~Van Morrison
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