Top 154 Quotes & Sayings by James Taylor

I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be.

I can take criticisms but not compliments.

I don't take compliments very easily. I think most musicians suffer from low self-esteem to some extent.

It's a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you're being autobiographical.

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.

I find it a lot healthier for me to be someplace where I can go outside in my bare feet.

If you think my music is sentimental and self-absorbed, I agree with you.

We all have to face pain, and pain makes us grow.

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.

I was a functional addict.

I was in chemical jail.

I don't think anyone really says anything new.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

There'll come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done.

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

Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal, for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons, and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.

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 think people are isolated because of the nature of human consciousness, and they like it when they feel the connection between themselves and someone else.

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

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.

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

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

I am myself for a living. I don't animate a character.

I started being a songwriter pretending I could do it, and it turned out I could.

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.

Time will take your money, but money won't buy time.

Performing is a profound experience, at least for me.

Bruce Springsteen's a rock star. Elton John is a rock star. I'm a folk musician. Honestly, I think that's true.

That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind.

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?

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.

A concert is always like a feast day to me.

Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have made a lot of difference to my audience that I'm as bald as a billiard ball!

I have a love-hate relationship with the Grammys because I don't see the music world as a competitive sport.

Knowing when to quit is probably a very important thing, but I just am not ready.

If I were to try to identify a turning point I'd say that was it - getting clean.

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.

I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die.

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.

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.

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.

Music is my living. I enjoy selling my music.

You have to choose whether to love yourself or not.

Being on a boat that's moving through the water, it's so clear. Everything falls into place in terms of what's important and what's not.

I collect hats. That's what you do when you're bald.

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

Certain things in life are more important than the usual crap that everyone strives for.

I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others.

Once you get that two-way energy thing going, everyone benefits hugely.

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

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.

If you feel like singing along, don't.

If you're an addict, it controls your life and your life becomes uncontrollable. It's boring and painful, filling your system with something that makes you stare at your shoes for six hours.

The Beatles were a phenomenon, but they were also ordinary blokes like anyone else. I was lucky enough to see that side.

Sobering up was responsible for breaking up my marriage. That's what it couldn't stand.

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.

I believe 100 percent in the power and importance of music.

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

Music is like a huge release of tension.

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.