Top 120 James Taylor Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Quart of whiskey a day for months working hard on a long poem. Wife hiding bottles, myself hiding bottles. Murderous and suicidal. Many hospitalizations, many alibis.”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

53. “The report falsely asserts that global warming is causing more extreme weather events, more droughts, more record high temperatures, more wildfires, warmer winters, etc., when each and every one of these false assertions is contradicted by objective, verifiable evidence.”

— James Taylor

54. “Karen, she’s a silver sun. You best walk her way and watch it shining... watch her watch the morning come.”

— James Taylor

55. “Turn away from your animal kind, try to leave your body, just to live in your mind.”

— James Taylor

56. “I’ve written a number of songs over the years and it’s a big part of my life, this sort of tension between a longing for home and the call for the open road. It’s sort of like a tug between two families. I even love to miss my home.”

— James Taylor

57. “Just nine lucky soldiers had come through the night, half of them wounded and barely alive. Just nine out of twenty was headed for home, with eleven stories to tell.”

— James Taylor

58. “I don’t find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.”

— James Taylor

59. “It’s the nature of human consciousness to look for trouble constantly, and we find it. We find it.”

— James Taylor

60. “I have a studio in a barn at home – we rehearse there, we film there and we record there. It’s fun to hang out with my guys and see what comes out next.”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

62. “Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to have made a lot of difference to my audience that I’m as bald as a billiard ball!”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

65. “Somehow it helps just to take something that’s internal and externalize it, to see it in front of you.”

— James Taylor

66. “My brother Alex fell in love with rhythm and blues early and gave me a strong dose of it.”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

68. “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.”

— James Taylor

69. “One of my earliest memories was me singing ‘Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’ at the top of my voice when I was seven. I got totally carried away. My grandmother, Sarah, was in the next room. I didn’t even realise she was there. I was terribly embarrassed.”

— James Taylor

70. “You have to choose whether to love yourself or not.”

— James Taylor

71. “I am myself for a living. I don’t animate a character.”

— James Taylor

72. “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.”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

74. “I had a very moral upbringing, and spiritual in a sort of not very specific way.”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

76. “I’m grateful to my audience, that there are people who will buy a ticket and come and see us play and who essentially support me and this life of music.”

— James Taylor

77. “Without a doubt, the warming of the past 100 years has been a welcome respite from a long and deadly Little Ice Age. The possibility that humans may have contributed to the recent warming does not make it any less welcome.”

— James Taylor

78. “The Test arena is a place I have been desperate to get back to, it is the pinnacle of the sport.”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

80. “I’m always making music. I’m constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs.”

— James Taylor

81. “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.”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

83. “There’s been plenty of adversity, starting the moment he was born. He had a respiratory crisis, and it was touch and go for a week whether he would survive. I think ever since, you can feel this pulse in the guy, an almost physical enthusiasm.”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

85. “I’m glad about what’s happening to the music business. This last crop of people we had in the 90s, who are going away now, they didn’t like music. They didn’t trust musicians. They wanted something else from it.”

— James Taylor

86. “Songs are like myths. Myths are useful because they allow you to cast yourself and your life and your own experience. And for some people, ‘Fire and Rain’ speaks to them in that way.”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

89. “I can take criticisms but not compliments.”

— James Taylor

90. “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.”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

93. “It’s true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.”

— James Taylor

94. “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.”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

96. “I know there are people who don’t like their audience or like the experience of being recognized or celebrated, but my audience has been very good – they don’t bother me and when they do contact me it’s usually on the nicest possible terms.”

— James Taylor

97. “If I were to try to identify a turning point I’d say that was it – getting clean.”

— James Taylor

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

— James Taylor

99. “In the beginning, there was a kind of energy that – like an urgency to express myself, and the songs just couldn’t be held in. But I think it changes, the nature of how that – what that energy is. And I need to court the muse in a much more serious way.”

— James Taylor

100. “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.”

— James Taylor