Quotes by Van Morrison

“Music is spiritual. The music business is not.”

“hark, now hear the sailors cry, smell the sea, and feel the sky let your soul & spirit fly, into the mystic...”

“and I shall watch the ferry boats, and they'll get high, on a bluer ocean against tomorrow's sky. and i will never grow so old again, and i will walk and talk, in gardens all wet with rain...”

“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.”

“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.”

“Being famous was extremely disappointing for me. When I became famous it was a complete drag and it is still a complete drag.”

“You can't stay the same. If you're a musician and a singer, you have to change, that's the way it works.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Every performance is different. That's the beauty of it.”

“The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.”

“The future is keeping you out of the present time.”

“Music to me is spontaneous, writing is spontaneous and it's all based on not trying to do it. From beginning to end, whether it's writing a song, or playing guitar, or a particular chord sequence, ...”

“Where I feel this has cost me is in the personality situation, where you're expected to be a personality. You not only have to write and record, but you have to go out and sell it. Well, I'm not a ...”

“Someone once described me as a maverick and that's what I would say. I'm a maverick not by choice but by conviction.”

“Like I say, the way I write songs is, you know, inspirational. I have to wait for it to happen. And when it happens I get lines, and I just write them down, you know. I'm not sort of a Tin Pan Alle...”

“With Moondance, I wrote the melody first. I played the melody on a soprano sax and I knew I had a song so I wrote lyrics to go with the melody. That's the way I wrote that one. I don't really have ...”

“The odd time something happens and you go into some kind of enchantment (on stage). But you have to work very hard to get that. Most of the time you're just playing and singing the songs, and there...”

“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”

“When I was fifteen, I became a professional musician. I got involved with people and did certain things which led me to start making records and touring. And leaving Belfast and going to London and...”