James Taylor Quotes

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

Just nine lucky soldiers had come through the night, half of them wounded and barely alive. Just nine out of twenty was headed for home, with eleven stories to tell.

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.

Quart of whiskey a day for months working hard on a long poem. Wife hiding bottles, myself hiding bottles. Murderous and suicidal. Many hospitalizations, many alibis.

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

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

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.

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

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.

If the gig's going really well, I'm incredibly happy on stage and really feel good about my life and things.

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.

I'm glad that I still have the ability to tour in Europe. I do love it.

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.

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

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

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

Within my heart is carved a sculpture of your love.

Turn away from your animal kind, try to leave your body, just to live in your mind.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Karen, she's a silver sun. You best walk her way and watch it shining...watch her watch the morning come.

Though the body sleeps, the heart will never rest.

Music is like a huge release of tension.

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

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.

Creativity is the process that gives life to a new product.

Do me wrong, do me right, tell me lies, but hold me tight.

Won't you look down upon me Jesus, you've got to help me make a stand. You just got to see me through another day.

The sides are steep and the nights are long and cold down in the hole, light and love and the world above mean nothing to the mole.

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?

We could never have guessed
We were already blessed
where we are ...

Winter, spring, summer, or fall, all you gotta do is call, and I'll be there, 'cause you've got a friend.

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

Let us turn our thoughts today to Martin Luther King and recognize that there are ties between us, all men and women living on the Earth. Ties of hope and love, sister and brotherhood, that we are bound together in our desire to see the world become a place in which our children can grow free and strong. We are bound together by the task that stands before us and the road that lies ahead. We are bound and we are bound.

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.

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

It was like the top of the roof came off the house, .. He had that effect on everyone.

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

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

Don't be sad cause your sun is down, the night doesn't need your sorrow. Don't be sad cause the light is gone, just keep your mind on tomorrow.

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

It is a process of discovery. It's being quiet enough and undisturbed enough for a period of time so that the songs can begin to sort of peek out, and you begin to have emotional experiences in a musical way.

I don't get into heavy political numbers because I don't find them lyrical.

Music is my living. I enjoy selling my music.

Songwriting is too mysterious and uncontrolled a process for me to direct it towards any one thing.

If you think my music is sentimental and self-absorbed, I agree with you.

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.

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

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.

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.

Try not to try to hard, it's just a lovely ride;)

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

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

I gathered up my sorrows and I sold them all for gold. And I gathered up the gold, and I threw it all away.

Music reminds us that the universe loves us

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

Time will take your money, but money won't buy time.

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

I wanted to perform, I wanted to write songs, and I wanted to get lots of chicks.

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.

I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be.

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.

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.

The Test arena is a place I have been desperate to get back to, it is the pinnacle of the sport

It's a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you're being autobiographical.

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

It won't be long before another day, were gonna have a good time. And no ones gonna take that time away. You can stay as long as you like

Ireland, Italy and Brazil are the most musical places for me. They're extremely musical cultures and anything you pitch they basically catch.

I don't build no heathen temples, where the Lord has done laid a hand. There's a well on the hill, let it be.

Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground

The report falsely asserts that global warming is causing more extreme weather events, more droughts, more record high temperatures, more wildfires, warmer winters, etc., when each and every one of these false assertions is contradicted by objective, verifiable evidence.

Shower the people you love with love.

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

Knowing when to quit is probably a very important thing, but I just am not ready.

I can't thank you enough for showing up. It's not the same without you.

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

I was a functional addict.

I told you that I love you, I was only telling a lie. I'll be long gone come the crack of dawn and I believe the word is goodbye.

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.

You know wherever I am, I'll come running to see you again

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.

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.

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

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.

I think there's probably a God-shaped hole in everybody's being. Even if God only exists in people's minds, He's still a force.

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

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

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

I've written a number of songs over the years and it's a big part of my life, this sort of tension between a longing for home and the call for the open road. It's sort of like a tug between two families. I even love to miss my home.

You can bring your enemies to their knees with the possible exception of the North Vietnamese.