James Taylor Quotes

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James Taylor

Profession : Musician

Birth : March 12, 1948

I was a functional addict.

James Taylor

I was in chemical jail.

James Taylor

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.

James Taylor

If the gig's going really well, I'm incredibly happy on stage and really feel good about my life and things.

James Taylor

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

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

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.

James Taylor

Somehow it helps just to take something that's internal and externalize it, to see it in front of you.

James Taylor

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.

James Taylor

Things started to get out of control when I began reading that I was a superstar.

James Taylor

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

Music is my living. I enjoy selling my music.

James Taylor

I don't get into heavy political numbers because I don't find them lyrical.

James Taylor

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

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.

James Taylor

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

Songwriting is too mysterious and uncontrolled a process for me to direct it towards any one thing.

James Taylor

I'm trying to look at my blessings and how amazingly well against all odds things have turned out for me.

James Taylor

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

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.

James Taylor