Gordon Lightfoot Quotes - Page 2

I love jazz. I still do. Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz are so good. I took a notification course in Jazz Orchestration. It wasn't a grandiose as you'd think but I did have to to go to Los Angeles to do it and get an understanding of the keyboard because the keyboard became my tool and I used it a lot in transposing and composing. All the flats and time values. I spent a year doing that because in those days you had to be able to write your own music and read sheets.

She been looking like a queen in a sailor's dream.

She is my flower and she blooms for the one who loves her best.

The road to love is littered by the bones of other ones, who by the magic of the moment were mysteriously undone.

Sometimes a broken dream will make you sad or make you mean. Sometimes things ain't bad as they seem.

Some years later I met Queen Elizabeth II, in our capital Ottawa at a Canada Day celebration. David Foster and I were doing the show and we both met her afterwards. She told me how much she loved the Canadian Railroad Trilogy. She looked at me and said, "oh, that song", and then said again, "that song", and that was all she said.

All that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

I would never have ever dreamed that I would get married again and then all of a sudden you meet somebody. That's the thing about life. It can be so unexpected.

Don Quixote was a song for a 1969 Michael Douglas movie called Hail Hero! I wrote the title song for the film and they also used the Don Quixote one I had submitted.

I worked in a plant when I was 14 for two years. I always wanted to do the summer jobs. Honest to God, I always had to be doing something.

Give me a wave I can ride upon, come and show your strength to me.

It was very interesting time to be in England. Even at that point [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney influenced my writing. I thought, "maybe there is a huck or two in here I haven't thought of".

I try to write songs. At our concerts, we take the cream of the crop from my back catalogue and I don't know if I could write something now that would replace any of that. We don't lose any of the standards. We have lots of songs in rotation.

The strength of his will was the tool of his trade.

I'm not really a bird person or an Audubon guy who studies them, but as I was around them, they interested me.

I never really had stage nerves but I did have had trouble getting up to the right energy level. For a long time I drank. I drank up until 1982 and then I gave up alcohol.

I was happy to be in England, because my mother had always loved the royals, and so do I.

A lot of people influenced me as I was learning but probably Bing Crosby was the most influential, because I would hear his Christmas albums, which my parents played a lot.

I got to sing solo in the junior choir when I was 10 or 11 and won a competition, and my sister's piano playing improved to a certain level. One time my sister and I worked together. The first song we ever sang in High School was Rags to Riches by Tony Bennett.

See the judge upon the bench who tries the case as best he can, see the wise and wicked ones who feed upon life's sacred fire, see the soldier with his gun who must be dead to be admired.

I took the song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face from a folk singer called Bonnie Dobson. I knew her and she had a record with that track on it.

I had lots of friends who were fighting in Vietnam and I am still friends with veterans of the war.

I can see her lying back in her faded dress in a room where do what you don't confess.

What has changed for me is that I now have a huge family [Lightfoot has four children, from his first two marriages] - the result of my living.

It seems so lucky to just to have the right of telling you with all my might, you're beautiful tonight.