Quotes By Van Morrison

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

I do see value in music criticism. Most of the criticism I have received over the years has been very good.

There is no black-and-white situation. It's all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.

I don't think nostalgia has to be negative.

In order to win you must be prepared to lose sometime. And leave one or two cards showing.

When I started you were more in touch with the people you were playing to. There wasn't the distance or the separation that there is now.

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 never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.

The future is keeping you out of the present time.

If it's what you do and you can do it, then you do it.

My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that's what I'm doing.

I've never felt like I was born with a silver spoon at all, although I've felt like howling at the moon a lot of times!

Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach.

Skiffle was a name that was attached to what was, in essence, American folk music with a beat.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn't mean anything to me.

I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.

I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.

As a developing musician, skiffle became a platform for me to start playing music.

I educated myself. To me, school was boring.

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

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

I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.

Even today, skiffle is a defining part of my music. If I get the opportunity to just have a jam, skiffle is what I love to play.

There's always got to be a struggle. What else is there? That's what life is made of. I don't know anything else. If there is, tell me about it.

I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.

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 think Paul McGuinness and U2 created the Irish music industry. It certainly wasn't there before that.

I write songs. Then, I record them. And, later, maybe I perform them on stage. That's what I do. That's my job. Simple.

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.