"The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport."
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Quote collection
Van Morrison quotes (page 12 of 13)
259 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now."
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"I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music."
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"I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out."
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"As a developing musician, skiffle became a platform for me to start playing music."
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"[Rock 'n' roll] music started out with some cat banging a log with a couple of pieces of stick. He sent a message across a river and although the cat on the other side receiving the message didn't know the exact words, he did understand basically something about what was being communicated."
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"I have to accept the fact that I was putting out records that reviewers were going to get an image from."
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"Everybody's got their own particular vision which is a personal thing."
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"The media is going to stick a label on records. And the public is going to pick it up from that. And that's what I was getting sick of-the whole analyzation thing."
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"Heavy Connection is just basically about psychic stuff...it's kind of about connections that you're not normally making. It's like a fate number where you're making psychic connections that you're not really aware of but they're there."
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"[Touring] is not necessarily a priority. It's just a part of who I am as a performer. That's obviously why I'm doing it; why I'm in this business is part of me has to perform."
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"I wrote a couple of songs that had gypsy references in them. The only reason it happened was because that's what was coming through and I liked the idea at that period of time. But that doesn't mean that it's a myth or that I'm a gypsy. It's gotten totally out of context."
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"There's no man alive who has any answers. We all know that. It's like the guru trip. All a guru can do is direct you to something that you probably already know about yourself, something you might want to followup on. Apply the same thing to music and records. You might get something from a particular record that hits a nerve and something inside you. But that's your vision of it."
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"For a long time, I couldn't actually deal with playing concerts, it was a totally alien concept to me, 'cos I was used to playing in clubs and dance halls."
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"I felt kind of bored at the prospect of writing some more of my own songs because I really wasn't saying what I wanted to say."
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"Well I've got to get out of the rat-race now I'm tired of the ways of mice and men And the empires all turning into rust again. Out of everything nothing remains the same That's why I'm cloud hidden Cloud hidden Whereabouts unknown."
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"I wanted to find out why I wasn't getting off on what I was doing and try and make some sense out of the evolution of it."
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"Some thoughts went through my head about recording some stuff that had influenced me earlier in my career like blues and early rock. But it didn't seem to really make sense at that point - it might have been taken the wrong way. A lot of people already had been into that trip."
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"I'd been performing in bands since I was 12 which represented, at that point, about 16 years of playing music."
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"You have to remember that writing those sorta songs is not reality, it's more like trance, dream, y'know, like dreamwork. The mythical thing can enter the creating but there's the mythical place and the real place. And there's both...I get it between waking and sleeping. Or, when I'm doing something else. I don't sit down and think I'm gonna write about subject X or subject Y. I could be doing something and an impression comes in from outside and the song emerges out of that. It's never thought about or contrived."
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