Van Morrison Quotes
What I don't like is taking it to extremes and making all these intellectualizations about what basically is simple music. It's simple stream-of-consciousness stuff in my songs. What I'm trying to get across is misinterpreted.
Quotes to Explore
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When you first hear Mozart's music, your first impression is that it's very alive, but if you peel away the layers, you can hear sorrow and sadness behind it, and that's what I try to be: multi-layered.
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I try to greet my friends with a drink in my hand, a warm smile on my face, and great music in the background, because that's what gets a dinner party off to a fun start.
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I always dreamed of being Maria in The Sound of Music.
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I'm trying to learn to smoke, which is rather weird when everyone is trying to stop. I'm not a smoker. But my character only smokes as an affectation.
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Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.
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I know how to make a record that commercial radio or Triple J will smash now... It's kind of hard to stay true and write what you would write if you didn't have that in your head. Because I know I can get way more airplay and get this much bigger... and that's what I'm trying to avoid doing. Trying to avoid the poisons of success.
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A stereotype may be negative or positive, but even positive stereotypes present two problems: They are cliches, and they present a human being as far more simple and uniform than any human being actually is.
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I'm an old-school, embarrassing Joni Mitchell fan. Her music made a hook in my soul and hasn't let go for all these years. I even sing her songs as lullabies to my kids.
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A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
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Right now I am trying to be in a place of calm, a place where I can chill out and then handle the chaos of life better. You don't just get it overnight; you have to work at it. It's a daily struggle.
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The truth is, I've been going pretty much nuts all year. I constantly have to fight being scattered. I feel like I'm on automatic pilot from fatigue. The hardest thing is trying to be present, living for the moment, for everybody in the family.
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I've always been singing all my life, but I started playing guitar when I was 19, and that was my final year in university, in law school. I think that happened when I started making a lot of friends who were in the independent music scene.
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It caused more problems as a young kid, because the simple process of perceiving words on a piece of paper was hard for me. Many people think dyslexic people see things backwards. They don't see things backwards.
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The simple reality of life is that everyone is wrong on a regular basis. By confronting these inevitable errors, you allow yourself to make corrections before it is too late.
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From a very young age, music was very much in my house. I would sit with my mom, with the old LPs, listening to The Beatles and Carly Simon and Lionel Richie. The old LPs used to have the lyrics. From there, I would put on dance and music displays for my family, just to entertain them and make people laugh and smile.
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Music is what our feelings sound like.
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Maybe in music you're making an auditory environment and maybe you change your environment around you to suit your own way.
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One thing that did get me into a lot of different types of music was when I was very young, the local record store went out of business and they were selling off all the vinyl. I remember going in – I was probably 16 or 17 and I'd just gotten a record player as a present. It was like hitting the jackpot: all these records for $3 apiece.
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When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.
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Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live.
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There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.
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I need to eat before a workout. If I exercise in the morning, I'll have a little oatmeal, cereal, or a hard-boiled egg with toast. If I go in the afternoon, I'll eat a turkey sandwich with cheese for lunch.
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What I don't like is taking it to extremes and making all these intellectualizations about what basically is simple music. It's simple stream-of-consciousness stuff in my songs. What I'm trying to get across is misinterpreted.
