Van Morrison Quotes

I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.

- Van Morrison

In order to win you must be prepared to lose sometime. And leave one or two cards showing.

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach.

- Van Morrison

I deliberately try not to cater for the commercial market, so I can't see myself in competition, you know, with second or third generation rock stars.

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

I think when you get past your second album, it all becomes something of a routine. So you have to struggle against that, find a way of making what you do sound fresh and new each time.

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

Being famous was extremely disappointing for me. When I became famous it was a complete drag and it is still a complete drag.

- Van Morrison

Hearing the blues changed my life.

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

Skiffle was a name that was attached to what was, in essence, American folk music with a beat.

- Van Morrison

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!

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

You can't stay the same. If you're a musician and a singer, you have to change, that's the way it works.

- Van Morrison

As a developing musician, skiffle became a platform for me to start playing music.

- Van Morrison

If it's what you do and you can do it, then you do it.

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

I don't think nostalgia has to be negative.

- Van Morrison

I educated myself. To me, school was boring.

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

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.

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

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

- Van Morrison

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

- Van Morrison

The future is keeping you out of the present time.

- Van Morrison

Singing is my profession - there is no plan B.

- Van Morrison