Gordon Lightfoot

“I wrote one called 'The No Hotel.' I got inspired in 1989 while I was on a trip down to Brazil, and I didn't finish it until eight years later.”

“A lot of people influenced me as I was learning, but probably Bing Crosby was the most influential because I would hear his Christmas albums, which my parents played a lot.”

“Turning back the pages of my sweet shattered dream, I wonder if she'll ever do the same; And the thing that I call living is just being satisfied With knowing I've got no one left to blame.”

“I don't think they should regulate the music field. I don't see how they can regulate the arts.”

“I have to play everything just perfectly. I can't take less of myself. I'm strong. I'm prepared.”

“All that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.”

“I try to keep it light and positive most of the time, whereas earlier on I didn't always do that.”

“I just do the cream-of-the-crop songs in my show. We just bowl them over; they love us. It just keeps getting better.”

“Everybody's got so much of their own to deal with. They have no one to turn to.”

“You hear about people who write 15 to 20 novels. How do they do it? You just gotta do it.”

“'If You Could Read My Mind' is a different experience every time I sing it. It's just that kind of a song.”

“I know that we're being inexorably taken over by the Americans. Without a doubt. I don't mean invaded or anything like that, just taken over. By degrees.”

“I started writing songs in high school, so you had to write this stuff out and register it with the Library of Congress. You had to learn how to do that stuff.”

“Both the Beatles and The Rolling Stones broke on the music scene the summer I was in England. I can vividly remember hearing 'She Loves You' in August 1963.”

“I've just been a very lucky person. I'm 76 years of age, you know. I've been very lucky.”

“Nobody had any idea that 'If You Could Read My Mind' would become a hit single.”

“I never believed - or knew for sure - if I would be able to make a professional life in music. But it turned out that way.”

“Every time you wanted to do something, you'd hope it would score. You'd keep trying and trying, and all of the sudden, something would come right out of left field, like 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.' No one had any idea about that one.”

“I have just a really strong love for people when I perform. I really do.”

“I'm not really a bird person or an Audubon guy who studies them, but as I was around them, they interested me.”