Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Gordon Lightfoot
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Canadian musician Gordon Lightfoot.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
Everybody's got so much of their own to deal with. They have no one to turn to.
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.
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.
I have to play everything just perfectly. I can't take less of myself. I'm strong. I'm prepared.
I'm not really a bird person or an Audubon guy who studies them, but as I was around them, they interested me.
All that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.
I was a drummer in the bugle band in cadets. I marched. It's probably quite funny to look back on it.
You hear about people who write 15 to 20 novels. How do they do it? You just gotta do it.
I've just been a very lucky person. I'm 76 years of age, you know. I've been very lucky.
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 did a lot of canoe tripping earlier on. I was on 10 trips, and I would get the feel of the forest and the wilderness, you know, that I always knew was in my soul to begin with.
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.
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.
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.
I was happy to be in England because my mother had always loved the royals, and so do I. My mother had every memento you could find on the Queen.
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.
Nobody had any idea that 'If You Could Read My Mind' would become a hit single.
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.
You just get the vibes of your surroundings and it rubs off on you.
I don't think they should regulate the music field. I don't see how they can regulate the arts.
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. And eventually, I got some songs recorded by some major artists, mostly because I was out there performing, and I was working in coffee houses and lounges, and people came to see me and hear my material.
'If You Could Read My Mind' is a different experience every time I sing it. It's just that kind of a song.
I try to keep it light and positive most of the time, whereas earlier on I didn't always do that.
The road to love is littered by the bones of other ones, who by the magic of the moment were mysteriously undone.
She been looking like a queen in a sailor's dream.
There is always something wrong with a song, you can't be perfect.
Some years later I met Queen Elizabeth II, in our capital Ottawa at a Canada Day celebration. David Foster and I were doing the show and we both met her afterwards. She told me how much she loved the Canadian Railroad Trilogy. She looked at me and said, "oh, that song", and then said again, "that song", and that was all she said.
If there's a reason for the way that life is I'd like to find it. After all, who's life is it?
Will you gather daydreams or will you gather wealth? How can you find your fortune when you cannot find yourself?
I was happy to be in England, because my mother had always loved the royals, and so do I.
Those who put their faith in fire, in fire their faith shall be repaid.
I got to sing solo in the junior choir when I was 10 or 11 and won a competition, and my sister's piano playing improved to a certain level. One time my sister and I worked together. The first song we ever sang in High School was Rags to Riches by Tony Bennett.
You will go with me everywhere. When I'm dreaming, you still share my lonely nights.
I never got really good at hockey.
The house you live in will never fall down, if you pity the stranger who stands at your door.
The strength of his will was the tool of his trade.
Sometimes I think it's a shame, when I get feeling better when I'm feeling no pain.
If I could read your mind, what a tale your thoughts could tell. Just like a paperback novel, the kind that drugstores sell.
Rainy day people all know there's no sorrow they can't rise above.
Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?
I never really had stage nerves but I did have had trouble getting up to the right energy level. For a long time I drank. I drank up until 1982 and then I gave up alcohol.
To wear the crown of peace, you must wear the crown of thorns.
Whitecaps in profusion all around me, but somehow in your eyes I found the strength to sail upon that raging sea.
I love jazz. I still do. Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz are so good. I took a notification course in Jazz Orchestration. It wasn't a grandiose as you'd think but I did have to to go to Los Angeles to do it and get an understanding of the keyboard because the keyboard became my tool and I used it a lot in transposing and composing. All the flats and time values. I spent a year doing that because in those days you had to be able to write your own music and read sheets.
Give me a wave I can ride upon, come and show your strength to me.
I worked in a plant when I was 14 for two years. I always wanted to do the summer jobs. Honest to God, I always had to be doing something.
She is my flower and she blooms for the one who loves her best.
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.
If you plan to face tomorrow, do it soon.
I'm a little nuts. I'm a lot nuts. All I know is that in the midst of the madness of this world it's my therapy. The music touches my heartstrings.
Everything is trust, all the rest is dust.
It was very interesting time to be in England. Even at that point [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney influenced my writing. I thought, "maybe there is a huck or two in here I haven't thought of".
Think about the fool who by his virtue can be found in a most unusual situation playing jester to the clown.
I try to write songs. At our concerts, we take the cream of the crop from my back catalogue and I don't know if I could write something now that would replace any of that. We don't lose any of the standards. We have lots of songs in rotation.
Be calm in the face of all common disgraces.
Let our hearts touch far horizons.
Let our love know no borders,
Draw the Circles wide until,
No one stands alone.
'If You Could Read My Mind' was written during the collapse of my marriage. It's a great song. No one has any gripes about it. I wondered what my wife and daughter might think. My daughter is the one who got me to correct 'The feelings that you lacked' to 'The feelings that we lacked'.
Words are for explaining the mistakes we might have made, names are for calling when there is nothing left to say.
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