Joni mitchell quotes

I see music as fluid architecture.

I never loved a man as far as I could pitch my shoe.

Love is touching souls.

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.

All my battles were with male egos. I’m just looking for equality, not to dominate. But I want to be able to control my vision.

I didn't like the sound of people gasping at the mere mention of my name. It horrified me...

If you're smart or rich or lucky Maybe you'll beat the laws of man But the inner laws of spirit And the outer laws of nature No man can

everything comes and goes; pleasure moves on too early and trouble leaves too slow

Chase away the demons, and they will take the angels with them.

In search of love and music My whole life has been Illumination Corruption And diving, diving, diving, diving, Diving down to pick up every shiny thing

Do you want - do you want - do you want to dance with me baby?

So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way.

All I really, really want our love to do is to bring out the best in me and in you too.

That's one thing that's always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that's it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint a Starry Night again, man!' You know? He painted it and that was it.

Applause, applause, life is our cause.

I wish I had a river I could skate away on?

The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music.

Bows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air and feather canyons everywhere, I've looked at clouds that way.

They'll crucify you for staying the same, and they'll crucify you for change. I'd rather be crucified for changing.

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.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980.

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. I thought, that's interesting, because I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist — not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision. The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music. That's why I spend my time now painting.

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

you dont know what you got till its gone

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; hes very misunderstood. Hes a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.

Rationally I have no hope, irrationally I believe in miracles.

All romantics meet the same fate some day. Drunk and cynical and boring someone in some dark cafe.

Heaven's full of astronauts and the Lord's on death row.

Land of snap decisions, land of short attention spans, nothing is savored long enough to really understand.

Some turn to Jesus and some turn to heroin.

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.

Bob [Dylan] is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.

Happiness is the best facelift.

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.

How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.

My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species.

Daydreamin' drugs the pain of living.

We call for the three great stimulants of the exhausted ones, artifice, brutality, and innocence.

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels The dizzy dancing way you feel As every fairy tale comes real I've looked at love that way.

Something's lost, but something's gained, in living everyday.

The only thing I have to give to make you smile, to win you with, are all the mornings still to live.

You can give me 400,000 hostile people and I won't even break sweat. If you give me 200 adoring people, my mouth will dry out.

My parents told me I'd point to a bed of flowers and say 'Pink. Pretty,' before I knew any other words.

Unlike some of my peers, I haven't really hit a writer's block. When I hit a block I just paint, which is an old crop rotation trick.

Laughing and crying, you know it's the same release.

I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty, more and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people where it goes into their lives and nourishes them and changes their direction and makes light bulbs go off in their head and makes them feel. And it isn't vague, it strikes against the very nerves of their life and in order to do that you have to strike against the very nerves of your own.

Oh, the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling. It's the unraveling and it undoes all the joy that could be. .

The thing that started me painting originally was seeing Bambi when I was about nine. I was incredibly disturbed by the forest fire that killed Bambi's mother, and that distress gave me the impulse to create something, as a way of dealing with it.

The times you impress me the most are the times when you don't try.

I thrive on change. That's probably why my chord changes are weird, because chords depict emotions. They'll be going along on one key and I'll drop off a cliff, and suddenly they will go into a whole other key signature. That will drive some people crazy, but that's how my life is.

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.

Keep a good heart. That's the most important thing in life. It's not how much money you make or what you can acquire. The art of it is to keep a good heart.

They paved paradise and put up a parkin lot With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got till it's gone

I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.

The thing that gave me the most pain in life, psychologically, and it gave me tremendous pain psychologically, is man's disrespect for nature.

And the seasons they go 'round and 'round And the painted ponies go up and down We're captive on the carousel of time We can't return we can only look behind From where we came And go round and round and round In the circle game.

You've got to shake your fists at lightning now, you've got to roar like forest fire You've got to spread your light like blazes all across the sky They're going to aim the hoses on you, show 'em you won't expire Not till you burn up every passion, not even when you die Come on now, you've got to try, if you're feeling contempt, well then you tell it If you're tired of the silent night, Jesus, well then you yell it Condemned to wires and hammers, strike every chord that you feel That broken trees and elephant ivories conceal

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.

You've got to keep the child alive; you can't create without it.

I learned a woman is never an old woman.

I see the entire world as Eden, and every time you take an inch of it away, you must do so with respect.

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.

In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.

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.

Fame is a series of misunderstandin gs surrounding a name.

The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there, either.

Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.

An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child.

I wanna be strong, I wanna laugh along, I wanna belong to the living. Alive, alive, I wanna get up and jive, Wanna wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive.

people will tell you were they have gone, they'll tell you where to go, but until you get there for yourself you never really know.

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum.

When the spirit of child's play enters into the creative process, it's a wonderful force and something to be nurtured.

Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they'll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they'll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they'll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they'll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they'll say Lookout Mountain. So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain.

Just before our love got lost you said "I am as constant as a northern star" And I said, constantly in the darkness, Where's that at? If you want me I'll be in the bar.

The God of the Old Testament is the depiction of evil.

I am a woman of heart and mind, looking for affection and respect, a little passion.

Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl. Most of my best work came out of it.

Lord, there's danger in this land, you get witch hunts and wars when church and state hold hands.

Morgellons is constantly morphing. There are times when it's directly attacking the nervous system, as if you're being bitten by fleas and lice. It's all in the tissue and it's not a hallucination. It was eating me alive, sucking the juices out. I've been sick all my life.

Freedom to me is a luxury of being able to follow the path of the heart, to keep the magic in your life. Freedom is necessary for me in order to create, and if I cannot create I don’t feel alive.

Once I got the open tunings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. Once I got some interesting chords to play with, my writing began to come.

Won't you stay We'll put on the day And we'll talk in present tenses

Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees, please.

Let light hearts remake us.

My childhood was very difficult. I had every childhood disease and then some, but my parents didnt mollycoddle me. They left me to fight those battles on my own. I guess that was very Canadian, very stoic. But its good. I had to become a warrior. I had to give up hope and find a substitute for hope that would be far more stable.

The most important thing is to write in your own blood. I bare intimate feelings because people should know how other people feel.

I never really wanted to be a star. I didn't like entering a room with all eyes on me. I still don't really like the attention of a birthday party.

I paint my joy and I sing my sorrow.

To enjoy my music, you need depth and emotionality.

You know that it never has been easy Whether you do or do not resign Whether you travel the breadth of the extremities Or stick to some straighter line.

Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.

Innocence is drowned in anarchy. The best lack conviction given time to think, and the worst are full of passion without mercy.

An artist needs a certain amount of turmoil and confusion.

I got in before SoHo was SoHo. It was just Little Italy when I was in there. It's still off the touristy track. It's just away from the Saturday action, the crowds and everything. It's too expensive. It's insane. You've got to be a billionaire to live on Manhattan now.

They won't give peace a chance, that's just a dream some of us had

I don't know who I am but you know, life is for learning.

People used to say nobody can sing my songs but me, they're too personal.

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.

Fly silly sea bird, no dreams can possess you, no voices can blame you for sun on your wings.

My goal as a writer is more to comfort than to disturb.

I love you when I forget about me.

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?

Edith Piaf knocked my socks off when I was 8, but I didn't know what she was singing about.

I don't like being too looked up at or too looked down on. I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshipped or spat out.

When the world becomes a massive mess with nobody at the helm, it's time for artists to make their mark.

But now old friends are acting strange They shake their heads, they say I've changed Well something's lost, but something's gained In living every day

I still believe in the power of the word, that words inspire.

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

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'm not a pitiable creature. It's just that I suffer very eloquently.

If you see yourself as a kingly type, then you need your serfs and your army and so on around you.

I don't know how to sell out. If I tried to sell out I don't think I could.

Sunlight will renew your pride.

Love is a very hard feeling to keep alive. It's a very fragile plant.

We are stardust, we are golden and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Whatever it was that I felt was the weak link in my previous project gave me inspiration for the next one.

I prefer Christmas, which is everybody's holiday. It's just my nature. I don't like to be zeroed in on en masse.

Yesterday a child came out to wonder Caught a dragonfly inside a jar Fearful when the sky was full of thunder And tearful at the falling of a star

Heart and humor and humility, he said will lighten up your heavy load.

Tears and fears and feeling proud To say I love you, right out loud Dreams and schemes and circus crowds I've looked at life that way. But now old friends are acting strange They shake their heads, they say I've changed Something's lost, but something's gained In living every day I've looked at life from both sides now From win and lose, and still somehow It's life's illusions I recall I really don't know life at all

During times like these, the wise are influential.

I'm a little young for retirement.

When I think of your kisses my mind see-saws.