James Taylor Quotes - Page 4

Music is my living. I enjoy selling my music.

I am myself for a living. I don't animate a character.

Bruce Springsteen's a rock star. Elton John is a rock star. I'm a folk musician. Honestly, I think that's true.

Do me wrong, do me right, tell me lies, but hold me tight.

A concert is always like a feast day to me.

I don't build no heathen temples, where the Lord has done laid a hand. There's a well on the hill, let it be.

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?

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.

But it's only after you've played it on the road 20 or 30 times that it becomes really finished and polished...and you realize what it means, and you get the phrasing right.

I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about Black music, about soul music.

I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die.

There's been plenty of adversity, starting the moment he was born. He had a respiratory crisis, and it was touch and go for a week whether he would survive. I think ever since, you can feel this pulse in the guy, an almost physical enthusiasm.

Television news is now entertainment, and the stories are being written by the people that have a special interest in them.

I'm glad about what's happening to the music business. This last crop of people we had in the 90s, who are going away now, they didn't like music. They didn't trust musicians. They wanted something else from it.

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.

My brother Alex fell in love with rhythm and blues early and gave me a strong dose of it.

To me, very much of what is artistic is people's very creative and inventive ways out of impossible situations.

Maybe my biggest aim is to bring a sense of that old mystery of rock 'n' roll into the new age of today's instantaneous and fast world.

No one can tell me that I'm doing wrong.

In the beginning, there was a kind of energy that - like an urgency to express myself, and the songs just couldn't be held in. But I think it changes, the nature of how that - what that energy is. And I need to court the muse in a much more serious way.

I'm glad that I still have the ability to tour in Europe. I do love it.

It's a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you're being autobiographical.

If the gig's going really well, I'm incredibly happy on stage and really feel good about my life and things.

I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be.

I'm always making music. I'm constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs.