Joni Mitchell
Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.Collection: Sympathy
I see music as fluid architecture.Collection: Architecture
I always thought the women of song don't get along, and I don't know why that is.Collection: Women
I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' He gets a bad rap; he's very misunderstood. He's a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.Collection: Teacher
I know my generation - a lot of them, they're getting old now, and they want to think back fondly, they want to kid themselves. A lot of them think, 'Yeah, we were the best.' That's the kiss of death. That's non-growth. And also that's very bad for the world.Collection: Death
It's in my stars to invent; I was born on Madame Curie's birthday. I have this need for originals, for innovation. That's why I like Charlie Parker.Collection: Birthday
When the world becomes a massive mess with nobody at the helm, it's time for artists to make their mark.
I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate.
My family could only afford to get me the box of eight Crayola crayons, but I craved the one with all 24 colours. I wanted magenta and turquoise and silver and gold.
I learned a woman is never an old woman.
Fame is a series of misunderstandings surrounding a name.
My style of songwriting is influenced by cinema. I'm a frustrated filmmaker. A fan once said to me, 'Girl, you make me see pictures in my head!' and I took that as a great compliment. That's exactly my intention.
I used to be monastic, almost. Now I'm like a Tibetan that has discovered hamburgers and television. I'm catching up on Americana.
The songwriting was almost like something I did while I was waiting for my daughter to come back.
When I came to California, it was the mecca of the world. Every young person on the planet wanted to be here.
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.
In New York, the street adventures are incredible. There are a thousand stories in a single block. You see the stories in the people's faces. You hear the songs immediately. Here in Los Angeles, there are less characters because they're all inside automobiles.
Everyone I know has attention deficit, and they say it with great pride. It's a bad time to be right.
In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.
An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child.
Edith Piaf knocked my socks off when I was 8, but I didn't know what she was singing about.
I'm a little young for retirement.
I see the entire world as Eden, and every time you take an inch of it away, you must do so with respect.
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.
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.
Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped!
There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.
Because I'm so busy and because I think of myself as a painter, I desperately guard the time that I have to paint. And sometimes I'm irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.
Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.
I'm not a pitiable creature. It's just that I suffer very eloquently.
Rachmaninoff made a musician out of me. His 'Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini' was the piece that sent me into raptures. It spoke to me. To me, it was a tender entreaty for the misunderstood.
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?
You wake up one day and suddenly realize that your youth is behind you, even though you're still young at heart.
I have an aversion to being mislabeled. Here's a label I'd accept: I'm an 'individual.' I'm someone who can't follow, and doesn't want to lead.
I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.
My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species.
White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa, rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn't have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It's basically militant.
Drag wasn't always counterculture.
The God of the Old Testament is the depiction of evil.
But I have a tremendous will to live and a tremendous 'joie de vivre,' alternating with irritability.
To enjoy my music, you need depth and emotionality.
I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.
This is a nation that has lost the ability to be self-critical, and that makes a lie out of the freedoms.
I can't remember anything I ever wrote.
I certainly don't want to be an angry old artist.
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.
I've got 50 different tunings in the guitar.
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.
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.
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.