Creativity Quote by Van Morrison

Van Morrison is puncturing the myth that fame is a stable identity you can wear like a jacket. He’s insisting that celebrity doesn’t live inside the person being celebrated; it lives outside, in other people’s gaze. The line “I’m not famous to me” lands because it’s so stubbornly ordinary. You wake up, you make coffee, you have a mood, a memory, a body that aches. None of that changes just because strangers can quote your lyrics. Morrison’s bluntness is the point: fame is not an inner transformation, it’s a social hallucination with real consequences.

There’s also a defensive edge. By calling fame “a perception,” he’s reclaiming a measure of privacy and control in a system designed to turn artists into content. It’s an artist’s way of saying: you can project whatever narrative you want onto me, but you’re projecting. That stance fits Morrison’s long-standing discomfort with the machinery of celebrity and press expectations; he’s famously prickly about being interpreted, packaged, or made legible on demand.

The subtext is a warning about how easily culture confuses recognition with selfhood. Morrison separates the work from the persona, suggesting that public adoration is less a reward than a distortion field. In the age of constant visibility, his observation reads even sharper: fame isn’t a fact you own, it’s a story other people tell about you, and stories can be fickle, flattening, and loud.