Quotes from John Mellencamp

All I'm doing is painting. It's my hobby. And that's that.

A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.

If I'm painting, I paint every day. I'll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.

I want my paintings to look like they were found in a garage. If they get a scratch or a hole in them, it just becomes part of the painting.

Everything I have is for sale. Material items are just things that pass through your hands that mean very little or nothing.

I want to sell to people my own age, because that's the way I write songs.

This is about black people selling out other black people.

Wait a minute, guys, I have always been on your side. I have always spoken for you, always tried to put on a good face for the state of Indiana. All of a sudden, some of you people think I'm a bad guy?

If fans are going to turn on me because of this, they weren't my fans anyway. I couldn't betray a whole 25 years of record making and not do this. I had to.

My grandmother made sure that I went to church every Sunday. And she'd come over and pick us boys up, and we would go to the Nazarene church. And back then, that was about as close to heaven as I ever got, because just the time to be able to spend with her, and she was very, very religious.

'Crumbling' Down' is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president - he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.

There's a young man in a T-shirt listening to a rock and roll station. He's got greasy hair, greasy smile, he says, Lord this must be my destination.

Music actually meant something when I started doing it. Too bad I wasn't mature enough to write anything that meant anything.

I thought I knew a lot about music. Then you start digging and the deeper you go, the more there is.

It's what you do and not what you say. If you're not part of the future, then get out of the way!

An honest man's pillow is his peace of mind.

With no bottom line, it's hard to know wrong from right. But I ain't ever satisfied.

The dust to which this flesh shall return, it is the ancient dreaming dust of God.

Ain't that America, home of the free? Little pink houses for you and me.

Some people say I'm obnoxious and lazy, that I'm uneducated, that my opinion means nothing, but I know I'm a real good dancer.

Future generations, riding on the highways that we built, I hope they have a better understanding.

Hanging out is a waste of time. The only time I would hang out was when I was a kid, I would hang out in the streets. But once I started making records, I stopped hanging out.

When did Jimmy Stewart not play Jimmy Stewart? When did John Wayne not play John Wayne? But that's what we like about them. When you talk about acting, you really have to respond to somebody's personality.

Sound quality was supposed to be one of the big selling points for CDs but, as we know, it wasn't very good at all. It was just another con, a get-rich-quick scheme, a monumental hoax perpetrated on the music consuming public.