Words matter. These are the best James Taylor Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Time will take your money, but money won’t buy time.
I find it a lot healthier for me to be someplace where I can go outside in my bare feet.
We all have to face pain, and pain makes us grow.
Songwriting is too mysterious and uncontrolled a process for me to direct it towards any one thing.
Music is like a huge release of tension.
It’s hard to find a way forward. When you’re 18 it happens in huge chunks every day, but after 20 years, growth is much more costly.
I don’t get into heavy political numbers because I don’t find them lyrical.
When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It’s almost theatrical.
If you think my music is sentimental and self-absorbed, I agree with you.
I’m very unstable; there’s no stability in a musician’s life at all. You live on a bus or on the road hand to mouth and you don’t know where your money’s coming from.
I think that we’re all totally isolated beings and always will be.
I don’t think anyone really says anything new.
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?
I don’t get into heavy political numbers because I don’t find them lyrical.
When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It’s almost theatrical.
It is a process of discovery. It’s being quiet enough and undisturbed enough for a period of time so that the songs can begin to sort of peek out, and you begin to have emotional experiences in a musical way.
I started being a songwriter pretending I could do it, and it turned out I could.
Things started to get out of control when I began reading that I was a superstar.
I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die.
There’ll come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done.
Music is like a huge release of tension.
I think people are isolated because of the nature of human consciousness, and they like it when they feel the connection between themselves and someone else.
That’s the motivation of an artist – to seek attention of some kind.
It is the most delightful thing that ever happens to me, when I hear something coming out of my guitar and out of my mouth that wasn’t there before.
I enjoy selling my music. I don’t enjoy selling myself.
I’m looking forward to being able to retire from being a public figure and being able to afford to be myself!
Bruce Springsteen’s a rock star. Elton John is a rock star. I’m a folk musician. Honestly, I think that’s true.
Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to have made a lot of difference to my audience that I’m as bald as a billiard ball!
The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.
When I cleaned up some 17 odd years ago, I felt terrible for about six months. The only thing that gave me any real relief was strenuous physical activity.
If the gig’s going really well, I’m incredibly happy on stage and really feel good about my life and things.
Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to have made a lot of difference to my audience that I’m as bald as a billiard ball!
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.
I was in chemical jail.
The best thing is when you hear somebody take your song and make something great of it.
Songwriting is too mysterious and uncontrolled a process for me to direct it towards any one thing.
I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite.
I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others.
Ireland, Italy and Brazil are the most musical places for me. They’re extremely musical cultures and anything you pitch they basically catch.
I don’t think anyone really says anything new.
Americans work a long away ahead of themselves because of the size of the place. To make any impact at all you have to promote yourself with live performances ages before a release.
Music is my living. I enjoy selling my music.
If you’re an addict, it controls your life and your life becomes uncontrollable. It’s boring and painful, filling your system with something that makes you stare at your shoes for six hours.
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 played the cello from when I was ten, and then I bought a guitar from the father of some friends of mine and played that for a while. And then when I was fourteen or so, I bought a guitar – a real nice one – in Durham, North Carolina, that I worked with up until I was about twenty-five.
Bruce Springsteen’s a rock star. Elton John is a rock star. I’m a folk musician. Honestly, I think that’s true.
I was a functional addict.
I don’t read music. I don’t write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.
It’s a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you’re being autobiographical.
Being on a boat that’s moving through the water, it’s so clear. Everything falls into place in terms of what’s important and what’s not.
Sobering up was responsible for breaking up my marriage. That’s what it couldn’t stand.
I was a functional addict.
I believe 100 percent in the power and importance of music.
I know there are people who don’t like their audience or like the experience of being recognized or celebrated, but my audience has been very good – they don’t bother me and when they do contact me it’s usually on the nicest possible terms.
Somehow it helps just to take something that’s internal and externalize it, to see it in front of you.
I think that we’re all totally isolated beings and always will be.
If you’re an addict, it controls your life and your life becomes uncontrollable. It’s boring and painful, filling your system with something that makes you stare at your shoes for six hours.
That’s the motivation of an artist – to seek attention of some kind.
Being on a boat that’s moving through the water, it’s so clear. Everything falls into place in terms of what’s important and what’s not.
Music is my living. I enjoy selling my music.
If you think my music is sentimental and self-absorbed, I agree with you.
Though ‘Fire and Rain’ is very personal, for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience… And that’s what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons, and then in some cases it… can be a shared experience.
Once you get that two-way energy thing going, everyone benefits hugely.
I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others.
I am myself for a living. I don’t animate a character.
I don’t reinvent myself in any major way. It seems to be a slow evolution. I go back and visit certain themes that I feel strongly about and resonate with me emotionally.
I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite.
I don’t read music. I don’t write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.
It’s a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you’re being autobiographical. But it’s what everyone wants – to get everyone’s attention, to have your music make a living for you, to be validated in that way.
Performing is a profound experience, at least for me. It’s not as if I sit down and play ‘Fire and Rain’ by myself, just to hear it again. But to offer it up… the energy that it somehow summons live takes me right back, and I do get a reconnection to the emotions.
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.
What I’ve always done as an entertainer is try to come up with things that people will find interesting, or compelling, or humorous.
If the gig’s going really well, I’m incredibly happy on stage and really feel good about my life and things.
To me, very much of what is artistic is people’s very creative and inventive ways out of impossible situations.
I’m looking forward to being able to retire from being a public figure and being able to afford to be myself!
You have to choose whether to love yourself or not.
One of my earliest memories was me singing ‘Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’ at the top of my voice when I was seven. I got totally carried away. My grandmother, Sarah, was in the next room. I didn’t even realise she was there. I was terribly embarrassed.
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