Joni Mitchell Quotes
24 quotations by Joni Mitchell
With a painting, you don't have to go back and paint it again. |
When you're trying to pass on the best of the stuff you're culling to what should be a hungry culture but you have it diminished... that's kind of disappointing. |
When you reach that kind of successful pinnacle, it is the nature of the business and the press and everything that they go about tearing you down. |
We managed to put together a compilation that had some creativity to it. In the meantime I was listening to the free radio stations and I noticed that during their war coverage they were playing these songs born out of the Vietnam War that were all critical of the soldiers. |
We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn't like. It has no resemblance to democracy. |
This is a nation that has lost the ability to be self-critical, and that makes a lie out of the freedoms. |
There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said. |
The more decadent a culture gets, the more they have a need for what they don't have at all, which is innocence, so you end up with kiddie porn and a perverse obsession with youth. |
The Beginning of Survival is my best album. I am very proud of it, and I am surprised at it, too. I thought some of Travelogue was a little heavy, but I don't think this is heavy. |
Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell. |
Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped! |
Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block. |
Nobody understood The Reoccurring Dream, but after September 11, when we were coerced to do a national duty and go out and shop, surely people could begin to see what I was getting at. |
My name had gone stale, and no matter how progressive I got, it was my time to die. |
Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing. |
I think I would go further into fine arts, I think, if I were to continue. |
I have one piece of music, since 1997, and I don't see it having lyrics. Where does it go in this world? So I haven't recorded it. |
I hate show business. |
I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions? |
I can't remember anything I ever wrote. |
Everyone I know has attention deficit, and they say it with great pride. It's a bad time to he right. |
Buddy Holly and the early rock 'n' roll was no lighter than the way I play. It's very minimal. |
Back then, I didn't have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn't enough time. |
At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar. |