Quotes from John Mellencamp

Give me someone I can look up to, show me someone I can love.

I couldn't have recorded this record 15 years ago. My voice didn't have the depth to pull these songs off.

I wanted to study at the Art Students League in New York when I was young, but I didn't have the money. Then I was fortunate enough to become Johnny Cougar Mellencamp. At the time, I thought I'd make a couple of records and get back to painting. It never dawned on me that I'd be 64 years old and still making music.

If I laugh a couple of times a day, I'm doing good. People think it's their God-given right to be happy, and it's just not. It's something you've got to work at. I like to paint the human condition, and the human condition is not smiles and happy people.

I've been around so many people for so long that I take great delight in my own company.

I would never say John Kerry would be a great president. I will say that George Bush has divided us; he has filled this country with hatred.

Nobody wants to make great albums now because nobody wants to buy them and there's no place to sell them.

People have the right to say what they want to.

Music was so important to the culture when I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies. We just expected that Bob Dylan was going to make a great record, and it was normal. It was like, 'Okay, here's another great record by Bob Dylan; here's another great record by Led Zeppelin.'

Want me to spend the night? Hey lover boy, you know I will, and my best girlfriend lives down the road, together we will thrill you.

As I've matured as a songwriter, I realize that if it's out there, it's mine.

I ended up writing songs and growing up in public with my songwriting. And it's a good thing for me back then: in the early '70s, there was a thing called artist development, where an artist could find his feet, find himself, find his voice. I think I made five or six albums before I sold five or six albums.

I was one of those guys, you know, playing and singing, and there was no reason for me to write a song, because there were so many beautiful songs out. And Bob Dylan was always the ultimate songwriter, and nobody could ever write a song as good as him, and nobody ever has written a song as good as him.

We had an exercise in speech class in school, impromptu speaking, that I was always real good at.

I was born with Spina bifida. That's where you have a hole in your spine, and your nerve endings come out.

Grace, Mercy and Forgiveness will help a man walk tall. Walk tall!

In so many musicals today, the story is moved forward by a song. I don't think we're gonna try to do that.

Broadway is a very different kind of place. It's kind of like Nashville in that there's a certain amount of people that are involved, and those people are what run it.

Natalie from the Dixie Chicks could have said what she said before 9-11 and no one would have cared.

You cannot expect the guy who drove the car into the ditch to navigate it out of the ditch. You have to put a new driver in the seat. I'm not saying the new driver is going to be any better, but we need a new driver. Kerry is the only choice.

All the women in the world want a phony rock star who plays guitar.

A lot of the time, I write in the third person, but I'm mostly describing my own ordeals. When those unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get free, you must defeat your ghosts.

I'm wide open and will entertain anything anybody has to say, but if it's MTV and radio, well, they're great things, but can't be the only thing. I don't know that it would work even for the Beatles.

A lot of record company people, even though they're our age, want to be perceived as young hip guys, and they're hurting the business.