James Taylor

“People should watch out for three things: avoid a major addiction, don't get so deeply into debt that it controls your life, and don't start a family before you're ready to settle down.”

“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.”

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

“The best thing is when you hear somebody take your song and make something great of it.”

“I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.”

“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.”

“I don't play the kind of music that works in a football stadium.”

“I don't think anyone really says anything new.”

“Music is my living. I enjoy selling my music.”

“I had a very moral upbringing, and spiritual in a sort of not very specific way.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Television news is now entertainment, and the stories are being written by the people that have a special interest in them.”

“I don't read music. I don't write or read music.”

“What I've always done as an entertainer is try to come up with things that people will find interesting, or compelling, or humorous.”

“A concert is always like a feast day to me.”

“To me, very much of what is artistic is people's very creative and inventive ways out of impossible situations.”

“I don't know much about God. But if everything does originate with God, then certainly songs do as well.”