Joni Mitchell Quotes

You know, Neil Young is singing Rock n’ roll will never die, and Neil never rocked and rolled in his life. I mean, he rocked, but he didn’t roll. He has got no swing in him.

You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit’s foot of their particular religion. You don’t really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life.

You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it’s just complaining.

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.

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 was this mountain village in Russia where my music was getting in on some German radio station. I remember this because music used to get up to Saskatchewan from Texas. Late at night after the local station closed down.

There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.

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.

No one likes to have less than they had before. That’s the nature of the human animal.

My name had gone stale, and no matter how progressive I got, it was my time to die.