A biography for Van Morrisonhasn’t been written yet.
“The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.”
“I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.”
“I've never felt like I was born with a silver spoon at all, although I've felt like howling at the moon a lot of times!”
“If you're a pop singer, you don't need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.”
“I write songs. Then, I record them. And, later, maybe I perform them on stage. That's what I do. That's my job. Simple.”
“and I shall watch the ferry boats, and they'll get high, on a bluer ocean against tomorrow's sky. and i will never grow so old again, and i will walk and talk, in gardens all wet with rain...”
“A lot of people who were writing when I came through originally as a singer-songwriter have disappeared.”
“These days politics, religion, media seem to get all mixed up. Television became the new religion a long time back and the media has taken over.”
“You learn to read the audiences after a while, and there are all different kinds of gigs.”
“You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.”
“I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out.”
“I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music.”
“When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.”
“I educated myself. To me, school was boring.”