"The odd time something happens and you go into some kind of enchantment (on stage). But you have to work very hard to get that. Most of the time youre just playing and singing the songs, and theres no guarantee that you are going to get anywhere...."
Sir George Ivan "Van" Morrison is a Northern Irish musician, singer, and songwriter whose recording career started in the 1960s. Morrison's albums have performed well in the UK and Ireland, with more than 40 reaching the UK Top 40, as well as internationally, including in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
"When all the dark clouds roll away And the sun begins to shine I see my freedom from across the way And it comes right in on time Well it shines so bright and it gives so much light And it comes from the sky above Makes me feel so free makes me feel like me And lights my life with love."
Van Morrison"And I shall drive my chariot Down your streets and cry Hey, its me, Im dynamite And I dont know why We shall walk and talk In gardens all misty wet with rain And I will never, never, never Grow so old again"
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"Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture."
Van Morrison"Someone once described me as a maverick and thats what I would say. Im a maverick not by choice but by conviction."
Van Morrison"Music to me is spontaneous, writing is spontaneous and its all based on not trying to do it. From beginning to end, whether its writing a song, or playing guitar, or a particular chord sequence, or blowing a horn, its based on improvisation and spontaneity."
Van Morrison"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"