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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.

James Taylor

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James Taylor
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 12
Guitarist
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
James Vernon Taylor
Write
Variations
Firsts
Lyric
First
Variation
Writing
Page
Make
Opposite
Opposites
Tend
Pages
Iteration

More quotes by James Taylor

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What I've always done as an entertainer is try to come up with things that people will find interesting, or compelling, or humorous.
James Taylor
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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.
James Taylor
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Whenever I see your smiling face, I have to smile myself, because I love you, yes I do.
James Taylor
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I am myself for a living. I don't animate a character.
James Taylor
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I don't know much about God. But if everything does originate with God, then certainly songs do as well.
James Taylor
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It's easier to make an album, harder to figure out how to get people to notice it.
James Taylor
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But it's only after you've played it on the road 20 or 30 times that it becomes really finished and polished...and you realize what it means, and you get the phrasing right.
James Taylor
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I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others.
James Taylor
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In my mind I'm going to Carolina. Can't you see the sunshine, can't you just feel the moonshine? Ain't it just like a friend of mine, to hit me from behind, and I'm goin' to Carolina in my mind.
James Taylor
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I was in chemical jail.
James Taylor
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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
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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
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If I were to try to identify a turning point I'd say that was it - getting clean.
James Taylor
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I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die.
James Taylor
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You have to choose whether to love yourself or not.
James Taylor
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I've seen fire and I've seen rain I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend But I always thought that I'd see you again.
James Taylor
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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
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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
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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.
James Taylor
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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