Quotes from Joni Mitchell

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 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?

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

I came through folk music simply because it was easy to get into it.

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

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 find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

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

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.

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 an individual, and an individual can't follow and doesn't want to lead.

There'll be icicles and birthday clothes And sometimes there'll be sorrow

Well something's lost but something's gained in living every day.

Art is short for artificial…so the art of art is to be as real as you can within this artificial situation… In a way it's a lie to get you to see the truth.

A woman I knew just drowned herself The well was deep and muddy She was just shaking off futility Or punishing somebody My friends were calling up all day yesterday All emotions and abstractions It seems we all live so close to that line and so far from satisfaction

we are stardust, billion year old carbon. we are golden, caught in the devil's bargain.

I have a tremendous joie de vivre... alternating with irritability of course.

In search of love and music my whole life has been Illumination Corruption And diving, diving, diving, diving down To pick up on every shiny thing

Fold your fleet wings I have brought some dreams to share A dream that you love someone A dream that the wars are done

It's just that I suffer very eloquently

I've looked at life from both sides now From up and down and still somehow It's life's illusions I recall I really don't know life at all

I was only a folk singer for about two years…. By that time, it wasn't really folk music anymore. It was some new American phenomenon. Later, they called it singer/songwriters. Or art songs, which I liked best. Some people get nervous about that word. Art. They think it's a pretentious word from the giddyap. To me, … the word art has never lost its vitality.

I never saw a sky so green, never so blue