Quotes By Van Morrison

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!

It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.

I'm not a rock singer and I don't want to be a rock singer. I'm not interested. It doesn't seem to get across.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

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

Hearing the blues changed my life.

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

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.

You've got to separate the singer and the songs.

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

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

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.

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

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

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 think nostalgia has to be negative.

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.

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.

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

I'm very lucky, I'm happy with life because my experiences led me to do what I had to do. I don't have any regrets whatsoever.

If you're a pop singer, you don't need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.

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.

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.

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

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.