Quotes from Joni Mitchell

America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It's grotesquely mentally ill.

I'm a method actress in my songs, which is why it's hard to sing them.

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

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

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

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 sing my sorrow, and I paint my joy.

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

Eventually, with success, I started to feel more and more isolated - like I didn't have a community of artists.

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.

I see music as fluid architecture.

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.

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

An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child.

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

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.

What I do is unusual: chordal movements that have never been used before, changing keys and modalities mid-song.

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

If I'm censoring for anyone, it's for my parents. They are very old-fashioned and moral people. They still don't understand me that well.

I was young for my age. Not as naïve as they expected. I don't know why I seem to bring that out in people.

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

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

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

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