Quotes By James Taylor

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

Performing is a profound experience, at least for me.

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.

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.

If you feel like singing along, don't.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.

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.

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.

Music is like a huge release of tension.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.