Van Morrison quotes

Born
31 August 1945, Bloomfield, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Occupation
Singer, songwriter, musician.

Van Morrison is an Northern Irish singer, songwriter and musician.

The future is keeping you out of the present time.
– Van Morrison

My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that’s what I’m doing.
– Van Morrison

A lot of people who were writing when I came through originally as a singer-songwriter have disappeared.
– Van Morrison

I put out records to this day that are not necessarily in a sequence of anything. Some could be written a while back, some not. There is no set pattern.
– Van Morrison

I always record far more than I can use. There’s probably twice as much recorded as comes out.
– Van Morrison

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.
– Van Morrison

Every performance is different. That’s the beauty of it.
– Van Morrison

As a developing musician, skiffle became a platform for me to start playing music.
– Van Morrison

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.
– Van Morrison

There is no black-and-white situation. It’s all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.
– Van Morrison

You learn to read the audiences after a while, and there are all different kinds of gigs.
– Van Morrison

I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music.
– Van Morrison

I think Paul McGuinness and U2 created the Irish music industry. It certainly wasn’t there before that.
– Van Morrison

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.
– Van Morrison

I don’t feel comfortable doing interviews. My profession is music, and writing songs. That’s what I do. I like to do it, but I hate to talk about it.
– Van Morrison

I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn’t mean anything to me.
– Van Morrison

I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.
– Van Morrison

If it’s what you do and you can do it, then you do it.
– Van Morrison

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.
– Van Morrison

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!
– Van Morrison

I don’t think nostalgia has to be negative.
– Van Morrison

I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.
– Van Morrison

I deliberately try not to cater for the commercial market, so I can’t see myself in competition, you know, with second or third generation rock stars.
– Van Morrison

I’m not a rock singer and I don’t want to be a rock singer. I’m not interested. It doesn’t seem to get across.
– Van Morrison

Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach.
– Van Morrison

I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.
– Van Morrison

I’d love to live in Ireland but I’d like to live as me, not what someone thinks I am. People don’t understand – I lived there before I was famous.
– Van Morrison

Hearing the blues changed my life.
– Van Morrison

The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.
– Van Morrison

When I started you were more in touch with the people you were playing to. There wasn’t the distance or the separation that there is now.
– Van Morrison

I educated myself. To me, school was boring.
– Van Morrison