James Taylor Quotations

Music is like a huge release of tension.

I have a love-hate relationship with the Grammys because I don't see the music world as a competitive sport.

That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind.

Once you get that two-way energy thing going, everyone benefits hugely.

I collect hats. That's what you do when you're bald.

Certain things in life are more important than the usual crap that everyone strives for.

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.

People should watch out for three things: avoid a major addiction, don't get so deeply into debt that it controls your life, and don't start a family before you're ready to settle down.

Being on a boat that's moving through the water, it's so clear. Everything falls into place in terms of what's important and what's not.

I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

I find it a lot healthier for me to be someplace where I can go outside in my bare feet.

You have to choose whether to love yourself or not.

I think people are isolated because of the nature of human consciousness, and they like it when they feel the connection between themselves and someone else.

I believe 100 percent in the power and importance of music.

Television news is now entertainment, and the stories are being written by the people that have a special interest in them.

I don't take compliments very easily. I think most musicians suffer from low self-esteem to some extent.

Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have made a lot of difference to my audience that I'm as bald as a billiard ball!

A concert is always like a feast day to me.

If you're an addict, it controls your life and your life becomes uncontrollable. It's boring and painful, filling your system with something that makes you stare at your shoes for six hours.

We all have to face pain, and pain makes us grow.

I don't play the kind of music that works in a football stadium.

I'm looking forward to being able to retire from being a public figure and being able to afford to be myself!

Bruce Springsteen's a rock star. Elton John is a rock star. I'm a folk musician. Honestly, I think that's true.

Performing is a profound experience, at least for me. It's not as if I sit down and play 'Fire and Rain' by myself, just to hear it again. But to offer it up... the energy that it somehow summons live takes me right back, and I do get a reconnection to the emotions.

I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.

Yes, but it's my life has been wasted, And I have been the fool, To let this manufacturer use my body for a tool, I can ride home in the evening, Staring at my hands, Swearing by my sorrow that a young girl, Ought to stand a better chance, So may I w

Won't you look down upon me, Jesus. You gotta help me make a stand,

I hate it when they say 'Don't change horses in midstream' ... if your horse can't swim and he's way over his head.

I don't reinvent myself in any major way. It seems to be a slow evolution. I go back and visit certain themes that I feel strongly about and resonate with me emotionally.

I enjoy selling my music. I don't enjoy selling myself.

He doesn't have the same kind of support community that I do in maintaining a career. He feels as though he's lived long enough and done well enough to be of service, and more than anything else that's the way he defines success. It's not so much his business as his work.

I was a huge Beatles fan. We could talk about who I listened to growing up and what my sources were, but certainly the Beatles were a late, important resource for me, and I just took my guitar and a handful of songs, and I decided, well, I'll just go over and travel around Europe and see what comes of it.

Our needs are so big, and our vision is so small. I'd just hate to see the community utilize its waterfront in a way that would preclude jobs.

People have used my songs and guitar style to teach guitar for a long time.

I was backstage when James called me back to the stage again to sing 'How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)' with him. I don't even feel like it was me up there. It was so intense.

We are part of the community, and we need investigation to be proactive, to look to the outside, to encourage people to come up with bright ideas.

When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It's almost theatrical.

Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal, for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons, and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.

You have to brace yourself for the smell. It is a really bad stench. It is disgusting, absolutely disgusting.

There are a dozen or so songs people are expecting to hear, ... You don't do them all, but you put six or seven of those songs in the set. And you try to vary the arrangement of things that are familiar.

We're the only deep-water port in Skagit County. Somehow we don't want to tie it all up with restaurants.

I've seen fire and I've seen rain, I've seen sunny days I thought would never end, I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend, but I always thought I'd see you again

I've always worked all my life and now I need a hand, not a handout. That's why I'm here.

Performing is a profound experience, at least for me.

So we talked about the tune, we talked about the lyric and about how we would divide it up and approach it. There certainly wasn't time to say, 'By the way, do you remember 1965, McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts? What was that all about?'

That one inning killed us; it killed us bad. We just have to step it up in the future and make the easy plays when we have them and not get rattled. One innocent play started it and it kind of snowballed from there. Suddenly we couldn't make a play.

They do need a place to move to, keep that in mind, county commissioners.

It's been a number of years since I worked solo. That's all I used to do, and that's how I started out. So it's nice to get back to that every once in a while.

The best thing is when you hear somebody take your song and make something great of it.

Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.

I'm beginning to warm to the prospect of it. I've always liked the idea of other people singing my songs.

I tend to like things that I've written recently because it's fresh but then there are things that I think really turned out well. I'd say I'm still pretty proud of Sweet Baby James.

I don't read music. I don't write or read music.

It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.

I'm always making music. I'm constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs.

I'm grateful to my audience, that there are people who will buy a ticket and come and see us play and who essentially support me and this life of music.

The relationship, the marriage, the commitment, the partnership... This is the holy ground.

It's easier to make an album, harder to figure out how to get people to notice it...

People are making a lot of music and higher and higher quality. I can't say the same thing for how people are listening to music. People are hearing music through terrible speakers, little computer speakers, there's a lot to get back to in terms of hi-fi and people listening to better quality, technically better quality music.

In the beginning, there was a kind of energy that - like an urgency to express myself, and the songs just couldn't be held in. But I think it changes, the nature of how that - what that energy is. And I need to court the muse in a much more serious way.

I'm often surprised by classical music and musicians. I've met a large number of them because my wife works for the Boston Symphony, and I'm in that world a lot now. I'm surprised at how difficult it is for people who are classically trained to read music or to memorize music, how difficult it is for them to improvise, to just go off and play. It's sort of, it's like terra incognita. They just, (makes noise) they don't get it.

I think of myself as a highly spiritual person, but without - I was never really given a religion or a religious experience or a community to sort of subscribe to.

It's the nature of human consciousness to look for trouble constantly, and we find it. We find it.

Americans work a long away ahead of themselves because of the size of the place. To make any impact at all you have to promote yourself with live performances ages before a release.

In my mind I'm going to Carolina. Can't you see the sunshine, can't you just feel the moonshine? Ain't it just like a friend of mine, to hit me from behind, and I'm goin' to Carolina in my mind.

If you feel like singing along, don't.

Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose Won't you let me go down in my dreams?

Global warming activists claim a serious public concern presently exists and the overwhelming majority of scientists agrees humans are creating a global warming crisis. The survey of AMS meteorologists, however, shows no such overwhelming majority exists. Indeed, to the extent we can assign a majority scientific opinion to whether all the necessary components of a global warming crisis exist, the AMS survey shows the majority does not agree humans are creating a global warming crisis.

It's probably foolish to expect relationships to go on forever and to say that because something only lasts 10 years, it's a failure.

Music is my living. I enjoy selling my music.

Synchronized with the rising moon Even with the evening star They were true love written in stone They were never alone, they were never that far apart

I played the cello from when I was ten, and then I bought a guitar from the father of some friends of mine and played that for a while. And then when I was fourteen or so, I bought a guitar - a real nice one - in Durham, North Carolina, that I worked with up until I was about twenty-five.

Somehow it helps just to take something that's internal and externalize it, to see it in front of you.

I know there are people who don't like their audience or like the experience of being recognized or celebrated, but my audience has been very good - they don't bother me and when they do contact me it's usually on the nicest possible terms.

I have a studio in a barn at home - we rehearse there, we film there and we record there. It's fun to hang out with my guys and see what comes out next.

Shower the people you love with love Show them the way that you feel Things are gonna work out fine if you only will.

I'm very unstable; there's no stability in a musician's life at all. You live on a bus or on the road hand to mouth and you don't know where your money's coming from.

I know now one thing only matters in these days... true love... love and love alone.

There ain't no doubt in my mind that love is the finest thing around

I typically will work on a lyric in a three-ring binder. On the right side, I'll write the lyric, and on the left side, I put in alternate things...and things that might be alternates or improvements. I'll turn the page and do it again. I'll turn the page and do it again, or incorporate the improvements. Eventually, I end up with some material, and often it needs to be ordered.

But it's only after you've played it on the road 20 or 30 times that it becomes really finished and polished...and you realize what it means, and you get the phrasing right.

Songs are like myths. Myths are useful because they allow you to cast yourself and your life and your own experience. And for some people, 'Fire and Rain' speaks to them in that way.

I've seen fire and I've seen rain I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend But I always thought that I'd see you again.

Whenever I see your smiling face, I have to smile myself, because I love you, yes I do.

When I cleaned up some 17 odd years ago, I felt terrible for about six months. The only thing that gave me any real relief was strenuous physical activity.

Photographers and reporters are mostly after me. They want to know what I read and what I'm like and I don't really know myself, so how can I tell them?

One of my earliest memories was me singing 'Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin' at the top of my voice when I was seven. I got totally carried away. My grandmother, Sarah, was in the next room. I didn't even realise she was there. I was terribly embarrassed.

I'm glad about what's happening to the music business. This last crop of people we had in the 90s, who are going away now, they didn't like music. They didn't trust musicians. They wanted something else from it.

Things started to get out of control when I began reading that I was a superstar.

The Beatles were a phenomenon, but they were also ordinary blokes like anyone else. I was lucky enough to see that side.

I had a very moral upbringing, and spiritual in a sort of not very specific way.

I don't think anyone really says anything new.

I am myself for a living. I don't animate a character.

Sobering up was responsible for breaking up my marriage. That's what it couldn't stand.

I'm trying to look at my blessings and how amazingly well against all odds things have turned out for me.

What I've always done as an entertainer is try to come up with things that people will find interesting, or compelling, or humorous.

I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die.

I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite.

It's hard to find a way forward. When you're 18 it happens in huge chunks every day, but after 20 years, growth is much more costly.