#morrison

Van Morrison is probably, at this point in time, my biggest influence as a vocalist. When we were making our last album I had a vinyl copy of 'Veedon Fleece' in the vocal booth in front of me, in the dorky sense. I think there were candles around, which is really tacky, but hey, I needed to channel Van the Man! ↗

— Nate Ruess

#around #biggest #biggest influence #booth #candles

The talked about their messed-up, dysfunctional families, carefully respecting boundaries, never probing too deep in any one sitting. And they always ended up laughing. Even when the subject matter was intense or macabre, Henry’s sick and twisted and often politically incorrect sense of humor was infectious…Gloria laughed more in these first weeks at Oxford then she remembered laughing almost anywhere. ↗

— Andrea Kayne Kaufman

#oxford-messed-up #poetry #van-morrison #family

Sometimes I wish Jim Morrison were still alive, because I'd love to see a concert in which "The Doors" opened up for "The Cars. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#funny #humor #jim-morrison #music #musicians

This is the strangest life I have ever known. ↗

— Jim Morrison

#ever #have #i #is #jim

Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#love #toni-morrison #love

Oh, yes! Fill the churches with dirty thoughts! Introduce honesty to the White House! Write letters in dead languages to people you've never met! Paint filthy words on the foreheads of children! Burn your credit cards and wear high heels! Asylum doors stand open! Fill the suburbs with murder and rape! Divine madness! Let there be ecstasy, ecstasy in the streets! Laugh and the world laughs with you! ↗

— Grant Morrison

#rape

Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better. ↗

— Leslie Fiedler

#become #better #black #books #clone

Astral Weeks,” insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boils down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt. ↗

— Lester Bangs

#baudelaire #music #van-morrison #age

I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#toni-morrison #writing #business

What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. ↗

— Patti Smith

#had #hendrix #i #jim #jimi