Quotes By James Taylor

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.

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

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?

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 don't know much about God. But if everything does originate with God, then certainly songs do as well.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 was a functional addict.

I started being a songwriter pretending I could do it, and it turned out I could.

It's a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you're being autobiographical. But it's what everyone wants - to get everyone's attention, to have your music make a living for you, to be validated in that way.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I was in chemical jail.

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