Quotes By James Taylor

If you feel like singing along, don't.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 it surprises a lot of people that I'm still around, you know, still - that I'm not pushing up daisies, as they say.

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

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.

Performing is a profound experience, at least for me.

There'll come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done.

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

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.

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

A concert is always like a feast day to me.

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

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?

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 know much about God. But if everything does originate with God, then certainly songs do as well.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

Music is like a huge release of tension.

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.

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