Janis Ian Quotes

It’s neat to have finally reached a point where I can accept what I was and what I am.

I feel I was born with the music coming to me, and that’s not something to be wasted.

I know just enough Japanese to get by if I get lost and greet an audience properly, just from having a lot of Japanese friends and being there over the years.

I want to do some fiction writing, I’ve had some pretty good luck with short stories, I’d like to do a couple of larger things.

When you’re young, the goal is to have a hit. You get a little older and the goal becomes to get to make another record.

When people used to call me a political writer, it was kind of confusing because I was always much more interested in the social end of things which hinges on the political, but it isn’t really part of it.

I think all of us thought that by the ’70s, at the latest the ’80s, all the world’s problems would be solved and everyone would be getting along fine. And instead we saw that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that year, Robert F. Kennedy died. We saw that it was going to be a lot more difficult than I think we had thought.

The money when you’re having a hit is great, but money can be taken from you. What can’t be taken from you is the talent and the effect your work has.

I bought all my friends guitars and I had a good time with my money. But then one day the IRS came knocking.

I gave guitar lessons. I tried to join bands. My mom always said it was obvious that nothing was going to stop me.

I played for anybody and everybody from the time I started playing guitar, when I was 10 or 11.

Once you’re halfway home, you know that you can probably get the rest of the way there.

I’ve always been an avid reader. If I don’t have a book in the car, I’ll stop and pick one up just to have something to read. I don’t even remember learning to read.

I learned the truth at seventeen, That love was meant for beauty queens, And high school girls with clear skinned smiles, Who married young and then retired.

Going off the road just leaves me more time to be a writer.

At the end of the day, all you can hope for is to go on. The older I get, the more I realize that just keeping on keeping on is what life’s all about.