James Taylor

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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I think there's probably a God-shaped hole in everybody's being. Even if God only exists in people's minds, He's still a force.

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Quotes by James Taylor