Quotes By Van Morrison

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Hearing the blues changed my life.

I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out.

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.

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

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.

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.

I don't think nostalgia has to be negative.

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.

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'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!

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

The future is keeping you out of the present time.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

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.

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.