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Joni Mitchell
69 quotes
“Once I got the open tunings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. [...] Once I got some interesting chords to play with, my writing began to come.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You're twiddling and you find the tuning. Now the left hand has to learn where the chords are, because it's a whole new ballpark, right? So you're groping around, looking for where the chords are, using very simple shapes. Put it in a tuning and you've got four chords immediately— open, barre five, barre seven, and your higher octave, like half fingering on the 12th. Then you've got to find where your minors are and where the interesting colors are — that's the exciting part.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's one thing that's always, like, uh, the major difference between the performing arts to me, and being a painter, you know. Like, a painter does a painting, and he does a painting — and that's it, you know. He’s had the joy of creating it, and he hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it, and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he’s never, you know, nobody ever says to him, you know, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint a Starry Night again, man!' You know? He painted it, and that was it.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Miles of Aisles (1974)
“I need to explore and discover and so that has given me, really, to some what seems like courage, but really it's just in my stars, there's nothing I can do about it . . . . I guess I'll just take my award and run now.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Said on being inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, www.chartattack.com (January 29, 2007)
“I don't like being too looked up at or too looked down on. I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshipped or spat out.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New York Times (February 4, 2007)
“…This is a period of relaxation for me, but there are still some weeds that need pulling. I kind of go with Thumper, you know, from Bambi. “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” That was my philosophy for a long time as a young person. However, I lost Thumper’s guidance as I grew older…He returns from time to time.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On whether she pulled out all the “weeds in your soul” during her youth in “Joni Mitchell: 'I'm a fool for love. I make the same mistake over and over'” in The Guardian (2020 Oct 27)
“…It’s, you know, the words to the song are your script. You have to bring the correct emotion to every word. You know, if you sing it pretty – a lot of people that cover my songs will sing it pretty – it’s going to fall flat. You have to bring more to it than that.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On inhabiting the sentiment behind a vocal performance in “Joni Mitchell: 'I'm a fool for love. I make the same mistake over and over'” in The Guardian (2020 Oct 27)
“…I liked playing the coffeehouses, where I could step off the stage and go sit in the audience and be comfortable, or where there wasn’t a barrier between me and my audience in the clubs. The big stage had no appeal for me; it was too great a distance between me and the audience, and I never really liked it. I didn’t have a lot of fame in the beginning, and that’s probably good because it made it more enjoyable.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On her discomfort with fame in “Joni Mitchell: 'I'm a fool for love. I make the same mistake over and over'” in The Guardian (2020 Oct 27)
“…The later work is much richer and deeper and smarter, and the arrangements are interesting too. Musically I grow, and I grow as a lyricist, so there’s a lot of growth taking place. The early stuff – I shouldn’t be such a snob against it. A lot of these songs, I just lost them. They fell away. They only exist in these recordings. For so long I rebelled against the term: “I was never a folk singer.” I would get pissed off if they put that label on me. I didn’t think it was a good description of what I was. And then I listened, and – it was beautiful. It made me forgive my beginnings…”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On comparing her early and later works and coming to terms with being categorized as a folk singer in “Joni Mitchell: 'I'm a fool for love. I make the same mistake over and over'” in The Guardian (2020 Oct 27)
“(Do you ever make yourself cry when you write?) No, never. I’m not a weeper. I’m a snarler. I just put all the weeping in the words. The words are the weeping.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview (2021)
“Truth and beauty. That’s what I hope to deliver.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview (2021)
“(Would you like to shatter any preconceptions?) I do have this reputation for being a serious person. I’m a very analytical person, a somewhat introspective person; that’s the nature of the work I do. But this is only one side of the coin, you know. I love to dance. I’m a rowdy. I’m a good-timer...But as far as shattering preconceptions, forget it. I feel that the art is there for people to bring to it whatever they choose.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All I knew was, whatever it was that I felt was the weak link in the previous project gave me my inspiration for the next one. I wrote poetry and I painted all my life. I always wanted to play music and dabbled with it, but I never thought of putting them all together. It never occurred to me. It wasn’t until Dylan began to write poetic songs that it occurred to me you could actually sing those poems.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The way I saw the educational system from an early age was that it taught you what to think, not how to think. There was no liberty, really, for free thinking. You were being trained to fit into a society where free thinking was a nuisance.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art. They think it’s a pretentious word from the giddyap. To me, words are only symbols, and the word art has never lost its vitality. It still has meaning to me. Love lost its meaning to me. God lost its meaning to me. But art never lost its meaning. I always knew what I meant by art.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I thought, “You don’t even know who I am. You want to worship me?” That’s why I became a confessional poet. I thought, “You better know who you’re applauding up here.” It was a compulsion to be honest with my audience.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I remember being at the Philadelphia Folk Festival and having this sensation. It was like falling to earth. It was about the time of my second album. It felt almost as if I’d had my head in the clouds long enough. And then there was a plummeting into the earth, tinged with a little bit of apprehension and fear. Shortly after that, everything began to change. There were fewer adjectives to my poetry. Fewer curlicues to my drawing. Everything began to get more bold. And solid in a way.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many, many times as a writer, I’ve come to a day where I say, “None of this has any meaning.” If you maintain that point of view, if you hold onto it and possess it, that’s it for you. There’s a possibility that you can come firmly to that conclusion, as Rimbaud did, and give it up.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I experience any frustration, it’s the frustration of being misunderstood. But that’s what stardom is – a glamorous misunderstanding. All the way along, I know that some of these projects are eccentric. I know that there are parts that are experimental, and some of them are half-baked. I certainly have been pushing the limits and – even for myself – not all of my experiments are completely successful. But they lay the groundwork for further developments. Sooner or later, some of those experiments will come to fruition. So I have to lay out a certain amount of my growing pains in public.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel frustrated sometimes. I feel bitterness, but I’m not embittered. Feelings pass. A lot of the humor in the music is missed. They insist on painting me as this tragic . . . well not even a tragic, because in this town people don’t understand tragedy. All they understand is drama. You have to be moral to understand tragedy [laughs].”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hejira was an obscure word, but it said exactly what I wanted. Running away, honorably. It dealt with the leaving of a relationship, but without the sense of failure that accompanied the breakup of my previous relationships. I felt that it was not necessarily anybody’s fault. It was a new attitude.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“as an artist I say to myself, “If you’re that good, how come you can’t be yourself?”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can put my dukes up now if I have to in life, but out of appreciation for honesty. I won’t settle for anything less in the studio. So much of music is politics. It’s going for the big vote. It amounts to a lot of baby kissing.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m still obsessed with pushing the perimeters of what entails a pop song. I can’t really let go of that impulse yet. I don’t know where I’m going. I never really do. My songs could come out any shape at this point.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Misery knows no rent bracket”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it’s a funny time for women. We demand a certain sensitivity. We’ve made our outward attacks at machoism, right, in favor of the new sensitive male. But we’re just at the fledgling state of our liberty where we can’t handle it. I think we ask men to be sensitive and equal, but deep down think it’s unnatural. And we really want them to be stronger than us. So you get into this paradoxical thing.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think if you’re healthy, aging can be quite a beautiful process, and I think we’ve created an artificial problem for ourselves.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like to work myself up to a state of enthusiasm about anything I do, otherwise, what’s the point?”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“any acts of frustration or concern or anxiety in my life are all peripheral to a very solid core. A very strong, continuing course I’ve been following. All this other stuff is just the flak that you get for engaging in the analytical process in the first place. Even Freud knew that; to me it was the hippest thing he ever said: “Dissection of personality is no way to self-knowledge.” All you get out of that is literature, not necessarily peace of mind. It’s a satisfying, but dangerous, way to learn about yourself.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a funny thing about happiness. You can strive and strive and strive to be happy, but happiness will sneak up on you in the most peculiar ways. I feel happy suddenly. I don’t know why. Some days, the way the light strikes things. Or for some beautifully immature reason like finding myself running to the kitchen to make myself some toast. Happiness comes to me even on a bad day. In very, very strange ways. I’m very happy in my life right now.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(about the label "female songwriter") It implies limitations...They tend to lump me always with groups of women. I always thought, “They don’t put Dylan with the Men of Rock; why do they do that to me with women?”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was kind of a media dropout. I was lucky if I could name the president. I was much more inner-world oriented.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t think of myself as an intellectual...It’s a nice place to visit; I wouldn’t want to live there. I spend as little time there as possible.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel more ambidextrous: I suffer, I enjoy; I suffer, I enjoy.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've always been a painter. I didn't come to it late. I was always the school artist. I came to music late, you know, relatively. I mean, I picked up — I tried it at 8. I took a year of piano lessons and wrote my first song when I was 8, wrote it out in notes.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've got nervous energy like a kid, still.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“at that point, that's when I forged my identity as an artist. At 8, I, you know, rebelled against the church and I rebelled against the educational system. I stepped outside the box and forged my identity as an artist.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(about her experience as a student in school) All they did was, she said something and you said something back. From here on in, I'm not even going to try unless they ask us a question that nobody knows the answer to.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(about "River.") We needed a sad Christmas song, didn't we?”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(about "Both Sides Now") I wrote it when I was 21. I took a lot of ridicule, too. "What do you know about life? You're only 21." You know, but I really think it took me to — that was done in my 50s — to, you know, it took a mature woman to bring it to life...I grew into that song.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I sing my sorrow and paint my joy.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like Van Gogh's paintings were a diary of his life, my paintings are kind of a diary of my life. And they're all good moments that I've preserved, and I've got them around me.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any time I make a record it's followed by a painting period. It's good crop rotation.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty, more and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people where it goes into their lives and nourishes them and changes their direction and makes light bulbs go off in their head and makes them feel. And it isn't vague, it strikes against the very nerves of their life and in order to do that you have to strike against the very nerves of your own.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's been a tremendous amount of growth. An actress is not expected to continue to play her ingenue roles, you know, I've written myself roles to grow into gracefully, but there is no growing into gracefully in the pop world. Basically the reason I'm so unruly in this business is because I never wanted to be a human jukebox.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In our possessive coupling So much could not be expressed So now I'm returning to myself These things that you and I suppressed.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You go down to the pick up station Craving warmth and beauty You settle for less than fascination 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 Clutching the night to you like a fig leaf You hurry To the blackness And the blankets To lay down an impression And your loneliness.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine, You taste so bitter and so sweet Oh I could drink a case of you, darling And I would still be on my feet I would still be on my feet.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rows and flows of angel hair, And ice cream castles in the air, And feather canyons ev’rywhere, I’ve looked at clouds that way. But now they only block the sun, They rain and snow on ev’ryone, So many things I would have done But clouds got in my way.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, From up and down, and still somehow It’s cloud illusions I recall, I really don’t know clouds at all.”
Joni Mitchell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source