From Wikipedia:

Van Morrison, OBE (born George Ivan Morrison; 31 August 1945) is a Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician. His live performances at their best are described as transcendental, while some of his recordings, such as the studio albums Astral Weeks and Moondance and the live album It’s Too Late to Stop Now, are critically acclaimed and appear at the top of many greatest album lists.

Quotes:

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

The future is keeping you out of the present time.

If it’s what you do and you can do it, then you do it.

I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn’t mean anything to me.

I educated myself. To me, school was boring.

In order to win you must be prepared to lose sometime. And leave one or two cards showing.

You can’t stay the same. If you’re a musician and a singer, you have to change, that’s the way it works.

I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.

Every performance is different. That’s the beauty of it.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

I do see value in music criticism. Most of the criticism I have received over the years has been very good.

There’s always got to be a struggle. What else is there? That’s what life is made of. I don’t know anything else. If there is, tell me about it.

When I was growing up in Belfast all I was listening to was American music.
Irish music was going on all around me, but that was nowhere. I was looking for
something diff erent.

Blues isn’t to do with black or white; blues is about the truth, and blues is
the truth.

Hearing the blues changed my life.

Well, it’s all about healing, isn’t it? Art, literature…. that goes way back. It comes back to this question: what’s your original face? Know what I mean? Who are you really? There is so many different kinds of healing but, if you are in alignment with yourself, then that in itself is going to be healing. If you’re trying to be something other, like something  superficial, trying to be someone you’re  not, then that would take you away from your true centre. Really, if you’re asking about those songs and those albums, then it’s about getting back to the true centre within yourself. That healing thing. It was nothing new. Music has always been about healing, hasn’t it? I was just doing my own thing on that.
(in an interview with Uncut Magazine about the album “Into The Music”)

—

When it’s not always raining there’ll be days like this. When there’s no one complaining there’ll be days like this. When everything falls into place like the flick of a switch. Well my mama told me there’ll be days like this.

Hark, now hear the sailors cry,
smell the sea, and feel the sky
let your soul & spirit fly, into the mystic…

Spiritual hunger and spiritual thirst
But you got to change it
On the inside first
To be satisfied

And I want to rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
And magnificently we will fold into the mystic