Top 100 Joni Mitchell Quotes
#1. We love our lovin' ... but not like we love our freedom.
Joni Mitchell
#2. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#3. I'm a fine artist working in a commercial arena, so that's my cross to bear
Joni Mitchell
#4. When the world becomes a massive mess with nobody at the helm, it's time for artists to make their mark.
Joni Mitchell
#5. Do you want - do you want - do you want to dance with me baby?
Joni Mitchell
#6. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#7. Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped!
Joni Mitchell
#8. And the seasons they go 'round and 'round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game.
Joni Mitchell
#9. Rationally I have no hope, irrationally I believe in miracles.
Joni Mitchell
#10. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#11. The rock & roll industry is very incestuous, and we have all been close at one time or another. A lot of beautiful music and a lot of beautiful times came from that. A lot of pain, too, because, inevitably, different relationships broke up.
Joni Mitchell
#12. I never loved a man as far as I could pitch my shoe.
Joni Mitchell
#13. Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm. They cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable, or mineral.
Joni Mitchell
#14. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#15. Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.
Joni Mitchell
#16. Fear is like the wilderland - Stepping stones or sinking sand
Joni Mitchell
#18. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#19. But you know it's hard to tell
When you're in the spell if it's wrong or if it's real
But you're bound to lose
If you let the blues get you scared to feel
Joni Mitchell
#21. I didn't think I had much of a following in the south. I thought I was anonymous down there so I kept to the south. I found in certain pockets that I was quite recognizable, and I just hit a wig store.
Joni Mitchell
#22. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#24. Richard got married to a figure skater, and he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator.
Joni Mitchell
#25. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#26. An artist needs a certain amount of turmoil and confusion.
Joni Mitchell
#27. You can give me 400,000 hostile people and I won't even break sweat. If you give me 200 adoring people, my mouth will dry out.
Joni Mitchell
#28. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#29. I'm drinking champagne, got the head phones up high, can't numb you out.
Joni Mitchell
#30. I have a tremendous joie de vivre ... alternating with irritability of course.
Joni Mitchell
#31. All the news of home you read, more about the war and of bloody changes.
Joni Mitchell
#32. I see the entire world as Eden, and every time you take an inch of it away, you must do so with respect.
Joni Mitchell
#33. An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child.
Joni Mitchell
#34. A little lawyer on the tube, he said, its so easy now, anyone can sue.
Joni Mitchell
#35. I could drink a case of you, darlin' ... and I would still be on my feet, yes I would still be on my feet ...
Joni Mitchell
#36. The land of litigation, the courts are like game shows. Take what's behind the curtain the jury cries.
Joni Mitchell
#38. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#39. The bands and the roadies, love 'em and leave 'em. It's pleasure to try 'em, but trouble to keep 'em.
Joni Mitchell
#40. I create by feeling rather than by intellectualizing.
Joni Mitchell
#41. He saw my complications and he mirrored me back simplified, and we laughed how our perfect world would always be denied.
Joni Mitchell
#42. But now it's just another show, you leave em laughing when you go. And if you care, don't let them know, don't give yourself away.
Joni Mitchell
#43. I assume there must be some kind of genetic thrust. My two grandmothers were very different, but both of them were frustrated musicians.
Joni Mitchell
#45. My name had gone stale, and no matter how progressive I got, it was my time to die.
Joni Mitchell
#46. It's life's illusions that I recall, I really don't know life at all
Joni Mitchell
#47. A few drinks later you're not so choosy when the closing lights strip off the shadows on this strange new flesh you've found.
Joni Mitchell
#48. I'm your biggest fan, California, I'm coming home
Joni Mitchell
#49. People were very protective of me. Overly so. I was in the industry for a long time before I had any idea of what drugs people were doing.
Joni Mitchell
#50. I am a woman of heart and mind, looking for affection and respect, a little passion.
Joni Mitchell
#51. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#52. Everybody's saying hell's the hippest way to go. Well, I don't think so, but I'm gonna take a look around it though.
Joni Mitchell
#53. Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I knew there was milk and toast and honey and a bowl of oranges, too.
Joni Mitchell
#54. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#55. Oh, I am a lonely painter / I live in a box of paints ...
Joni Mitchell
#56. We'll laugh and toast to nothing, and smash our empty glasses down.
Joni Mitchell
#57. I prefer Christmas, which is everybody's holiday. It's just my nature. I don't like to be zeroed in on en masse.
Joni Mitchell
#58. Heaven's full of astronauts and the Lord's on death row.
Joni Mitchell
#59. I never really wanted to be a star. I didn't like entering a room with all eyes on me. I still don't really like the attention of a birthday party.
Joni Mitchell
#60. My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species.
Joni Mitchell
#61. I met a redneck on a Grecian isle who did the Goat Dance very well.
Joni Mitchell
#63. There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.
Joni Mitchell
#65. If you see yourself as a kingly type, then you need your serfs and your army and someone around you.
Joni Mitchell
#66. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#67. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#68. I like my freedom. I like to do my own grocery shopping.
Joni Mitchell
#69. 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
Joni Mitchell
#70. The thing that started me painting originally was seeing Bambi when I was about nine. I was incredibly disturbed by the forest fire that killed Bambi's mother, and that distress gave me the impulse to create something, as a way of dealing with it.
Joni Mitchell
#71. I try not to steal from myself, but the modalities create similarities.
Joni Mitchell
#72. Musically, I don't think I'd ever dry up. I trust my musical invention.
Joni Mitchell
#73. When I was 19 I went to art school. I had six months of teaching myself to play baritone ukulele under my belt, so was sort of a novice folkie ... I was singing folk songs at that time.
Joni Mitchell
#74. All I really, really want our love to do is to bring out the best in me and in you too.
Joni Mitchell
#76. The only thing I have to give to make you smile, to win you with, are all the mornings still to live.
Joni Mitchell
#77. They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum.
Joni Mitchell
#79. I think I would go further into fine arts, I think, if I were to continue.
Joni Mitchell
#80. My parents told me I'd point to a bed of flowers and say 'Pink. Pretty,' before I knew any other words.
Joni Mitchell
#82. They'll crucify you for staying the same, and they'll crucify you for change. I'd rather be crucified for changing.
Joni Mitchell
#83. I have lost my credibility as a hit maker because of these side excursions into other branches of music by not being consistent. Consistency seems to be all important.
Joni Mitchell
#84. The God of the Old Testament is the depiction of evil.
Joni Mitchell
#85. I sang in art school, just to get money to smoke.
Joni Mitchell
#86. We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.
Joni Mitchell
#87. I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.
Joni Mitchell
#89. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#90. Chase away the demons, and they will take the angels with them.
Joni Mitchell
#91. 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.
Joni Mitchell
#92. Inside your own self pity there you swim, in sinking down to drown her voice still haunts you, and only with your laughter can you win.
Joni Mitchell
#93. Freedom to me is a luxury of being able to follow the path of the heart, to keep the magic in your life. Freedom is necessary for me in order to create, and if I cannot create I don't feel alive.
Joni Mitchell
#94. For the first time in my career, I'm working in a fine-arts arena, so I'm finally getting some intelligent reviews.
Joni Mitchell
#95. Edith Piaf knocked my socks off when I was 8, but I didn't know what she was singing about.
Joni Mitchell
#98. When you reach that kind of successful pinnacle, it is the nature of the business and the press and everything that they go about tearing you down.
Joni Mitchell
#99. I live in a box of paints
I'm frightened by the devil
And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid
Joni Mitchell
#100. I liked playing in small clubs. I really liked holding the attention of thirty or forty people. I never liked the roar of the big crowd.
Joni Mitchell
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