Top 100 James Taylor Quotes
#1. The best thing is when you hear somebody take your song and make something great of it.
James Taylor
#2. I think of myself as a highly spiritual person, but without - I was never really given a religion or a religious experience or a community to sort of subscribe to.
James Taylor
#3. Just nine lucky soldiers had come through the night, half of them wounded and barely alive. Just nine out of twenty was headed for home, with eleven stories to tell.
James Taylor
#4. To me, very much of what is artistic is people's very creative and inventive ways out of impossible situations.
James Taylor
#5. A concert is always like a feast day to me.
James Taylor
#6. Winter, spring, summer, or fall, all you gotta do is call, and I'll be there, 'cause you've got a friend.
James Taylor
#7. I don't take compliments very easily. I think most musicians suffer from low self-esteem to some extent.
James Taylor
#9. I started being a songwriter pretending I could do it, and it turned out I could.
James Taylor
#10. Knowing when to quit is probably a very important thing, but I just am not ready.
James Taylor
#11. I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others.
James Taylor
#12. 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.
James Taylor
#13. It's the nature of human consciousness to look for trouble constantly, and we find it. We find it.
James Taylor
#14. We could never have guessed
We were already blessed
where we are ...
James Taylor
#15. 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.
James Taylor
#16. I've written a number of songs over the years and it's a big part of my life, this sort of tension between a longing for home and the call for the open road. It's sort of like a tug between two families. I even love to miss my home.
James Taylor
#17. You have to choose whether to love yourself or not.
James Taylor
#18. I think it surprises a lot of people that I'm still around, you know, still - that I'm not pushing up daisies, as they say.
James Taylor
#19. Ireland, Italy and Brazil are the most musical places for me. They're extremely musical cultures and anything you pitch they basically catch.
James Taylor
#20. I don't find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.
James Taylor
#21. That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind.
James Taylor
#22. The relationship, the marriage, the commitment, the partnership ... This is the holy ground.
James Taylor
#23. 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.
James Taylor
#24. There ain't no doubt in my mind that love is the finest thing around
James Taylor
#25. 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.
James Taylor
#26. The sides are steep and the nights are long and cold down in the hole, light and love and the world above mean nothing to the mole.
James Taylor
#27. Songwriting is too mysterious and uncontrolled a process for me to direct it towards any one thing.
James Taylor
#28. It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.
James Taylor
#29. I don't read music. I don't write or read music.
James Taylor
#30. I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.
James Taylor
#31. Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose
Won't you let me go down in my dreams?
James Taylor
#32. I've seen fire and I've seen rain I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend But I always thought that I'd see you again.
James Taylor
#33. I don't think anyone really says anything new.
James Taylor
#34. All invisible from where we stand the connections come to pass, and though too strong to comprehend they affect us not the less.
James Taylor
#35. The Beatles were a phenomenon, but they were also ordinary blokes like anyone else. I was lucky enough to see that side.
James Taylor
#36. 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.
James Taylor
#37. 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.
James Taylor
#38. I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be.
James Taylor
#39. He's halfway sick and halfway stoned. He'd sure like to kick, but he's too far gone. So they wind him down with methadone.
James Taylor
#40. Creativity is the process that gives life to a new product.
James Taylor
#41. Things started to get out of control when I began reading that I was a superstar.
James Taylor
#42. 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.
James Taylor
#43. Time will take your money, but money won't buy time.
James Taylor
#44. The report falsely asserts that global warming is causing more extreme weather events, more droughts, more record high temperatures, more wildfires, warmer winters, etc., when each and every one of these false assertions is contradicted by objective, verifiable evidence.
James Taylor
#45. Synchronized with the rising moon Even with the evening star They were true love written in stone They were never alone, they were never that far apart
James Taylor
#46. You can bring your enemies to their knees with the possible exception of the North Vietnamese.
James Taylor
#47. 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.
James Taylor
#48. It won't be long before another day, were gonna have a good time. And no ones gonna take that time away. You can stay as long as you like
James Taylor
#49. The Test arena is a place I have been desperate to get back to, it is the pinnacle of the sport
James Taylor
#50. Don't be sad cause your sun is down, the night doesn't need your sorrow. Don't be sad cause the light is gone, just keep your mind on tomorrow.
James Taylor
#51. It's easier to make an album, harder to figure out how to get people to notice it ...
James Taylor
#52. Do me wrong, do me right, tell me lies, but hold me tight.
James Taylor
#53. What I've always done as an entertainer is try to come up with things that people will find interesting, or compelling, or humorous.
James Taylor
#54. It was like the top of the roof came off the house, .. He had that effect on everyone.
James Taylor
#55. 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?
James Taylor
#56. Though the body sleeps, the heart will never rest.
James Taylor
#57. Try not to try to hard, it's just a lovely ride;)
James Taylor
#58. I wanted to perform, I wanted to write songs, and I wanted to get lots of chicks.
James Taylor
#59. I'm grateful to my audience, that there are people who will buy a ticket and come and see us play and who essentially support me and this life of music.
James Taylor
#60. I can't thank you enough for showing up. It's not the same without you.
James Taylor
#61. Won't you look down upon me Jesus, you've got to help me make a stand. You just got to see me through another day.
James Taylor
#63. O, it's enough to be on your way. It's enough just to cover ground. It's enough to be moving on. Home: better build it behind your eyes. Carry it in your heart, Safe among your own.
James Taylor
#64. 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.
James Taylor
#65. Somehow it helps just to take something that's internal and externalize it, to see it in front of you.
James Taylor
#66. In my mind I'm going to Carolina. Can't you see the sunshine, can't you just feel the moonshine? Ain't it just like a friend of mine, to hit me from behind, and I'm goin' to Carolina in my mind.
James Taylor
#67. Einstein said that he never could understand it all, the planets spinning in space, the smile upon your face.
James Taylor
#69. If you think my music is sentimental and self-absorbed, I agree with you.
James Taylor
#71. Without a doubt, the warming of the past 100 years has been a welcome respite from a long and deadly Little Ice Age. The possibility that humans may have contributed to the recent warming does not make it any less welcome.
James Taylor
#72. I gathered up my sorrows and I sold them all for gold. And I gathered up the gold, and I threw it all away.
James Taylor
#73. 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.
James Taylor
#74. I don't know much about God. But if everything does originate with God, then certainly songs do as well.
James Taylor
#75. 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.
James Taylor
#76. 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.
James Taylor
#77. I had a very moral upbringing, and spiritual in a sort of not very specific way.
James Taylor
#78. 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.
James Taylor
#79. 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.
James Taylor
#80. It's a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you're being autobiographical.
James Taylor
#81. 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.
James Taylor
#82. 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.
James Taylor
#83. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have made a lot of difference to my audience that I'm as bald as a billiard ball!
James Taylor
#84. I know now one thing only matters in these days ... true love ... love and love alone.
James Taylor
#85. Turn away from your animal kind, try to leave your body, just to live in your mind.
James Taylor
#86. Whenever I see your smiling face, I have to smile myself, because I love you, yes I do.
James Taylor
#87. I believe 100 percent in the power and importance of music.
James Taylor
#88. I'm glad that I still have the ability to tour in Europe. I do love it.
James Taylor
#89. Once you get that two-way energy thing going, everyone benefits hugely.
James Taylor
#90. 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.
James Taylor
#91. I am myself for a living. I don't animate a character.
James Taylor
#92. I collect hats. That's what you do when you're bald.
James Taylor
#93. I enjoy selling my music. I don't enjoy selling myself.
James Taylor
#94. If I were to try to identify a turning point I'd say that was it - getting clean.
James Taylor
#95. Sobering up was responsible for breaking up my marriage. That's what it couldn't stand.
James Taylor
#96. Never give up, never slow down, never grow old and never ever die young.
James Taylor
#97. Songs are like myths. Myths are useful because they allow you to cast yourself and your life and your own experience. And for some people, 'Fire and Rain' speaks to them in that way.
James Taylor
#98. Bruce Springsteen's a rock star. Elton John is a rock star. I'm a folk musician. Honestly, I think that's true.
James Taylor
#99. If the gig's going really well, I'm incredibly happy on stage and really feel good about my life and things.
James Taylor
#100. The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.
James Taylor
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