Top 35 Van Morrison Quotes

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

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

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.

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

My records do not require a lot of thought of ‘What is this?’ and ‘What is that?’ That would be too contrived for me.

If it’s what you do and you can do it, then you do 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 put out records to this day that are not necessarily in a sequence of anything. Some could be written a while back, some not. There is no set pattern.

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!

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.

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

A lot of people who were writing when I came through originally as a singer-songwriter have disappeared.

I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music.

For a long time, I couldn’t actually deal with playing concerts; it was a totally alien concept to me, ’cause I was used to playing in clubs and dance halls.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

My thinking musically has always been more advanced – it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

You learn to read the audiences after a while, and there are all different kinds of gigs.

I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.

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

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.

Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach.

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.

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