Joni Mitchell

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

I'm a Buddhist.

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

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

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.

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

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.

I'm a very analytical person, a somewhat introspective person; that's the nature of the work I do.

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.

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

Van Gogh was impulsive.

I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance.

You wake up one day and suddenly realize that your youth is behind you, even though you're still young at heart.

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.

I've got 50 different tunings in the guitar.

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.

I used to be monastic, almost. Now I'm like a Tibetan that has discovered hamburgers and television. I'm catching up on Americana.

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.

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

I come from pioneer stock, developers of the West, people who went out into the wilderness and set up home with nothing but a pair of oxen.

I'm a little young for retirement.

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.

I always thought the women of song don't get along, and I don't know why that is.

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

I learned a woman is never an old woman.

In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

Everyone I know has attention deficit, and they say it with great pride. It's a bad time to be right.

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.

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

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.

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.

Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped!

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

I don't like to make fluffy little songs, but now I want to make some light songs.

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

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.

I certainly don't want to be an angry old artist.

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.

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

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.

They wont give peace a chance thats just a dream some of us had.

Fame is a series of misunderstandings surrounding a name.

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

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.

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.

When I came to California, it was the mecca of the world. Every young person on the planet wanted to be here.

I see music as fluid architecture.

I hate show business.

I sing my sorrow, and I paint my joy.

I love to dance.

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.

An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child.

Drag wasn't always counterculture.

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

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels the dizzy dancing way you feel As every fairy tale comes real Ive looked at love that way.

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

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

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

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

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

And the seasons they go round and round and painted ponies go up and down. Were captive on the carousel of time we cant return we can only look behind.

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 life came down to being a granny and watching a lot of television.

My first four albums covered the usual youth problems - looking for love in all the wrong places - while the next five are basically about being in your 30s.

I can't remember anything I ever wrote.

This is a nation that has lost the ability to be self-critical, and that makes a lie out of the freedoms.

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

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

I never really wanted to be a star. I didnt like entering a room with all eyes on me. I still dont really like the attention of a birthday party.

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.

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 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.

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.

With a painting, you don't have to go back and paint it again.

Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980.

My childhood was very difficult. I had every childhood disease and then some, but my parents didn't mollycoddle me. They left me to fight those battles on my own. I guess that was very Canadian, very stoic. But it's 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.

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.

To enjoy my music, you need depth and emotionality.

Buddy Holly and the early rock 'n' roll was no lighter than the way I play. It's very minimal.

Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.

But I have a tremendous will to live and a tremendous 'joie de vivre,' alternating with irritability.

I think I would go further into fine arts, I think, if I were to continue.

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.

And if you care, don't let them know. Don't give yourself away.

Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block.

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

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.

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

I conceived in art college at the age of 20, near the end of term.

I lost my daughter at 21. I had to give her up because I was broke, no place to take her, no money to take her. That was very traumatic.

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 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.