Joni Mitchell Quotes

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Joni Mitchell

Profession : Musician

Birth : November 7, 1943

I hate show business.

Joni Mitchell

I certainly don't want to be an angry old artist.

Joni Mitchell

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

There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.

Joni Mitchell

We managed to put together a compilation that had some creativity to it. In the meantime I was listening to the free radio stations and I noticed that during their war coverage they were playing these songs born out of the Vietnam War that were all critical of the soldiers.

Joni Mitchell

No one likes to have less than they had before. That's the nature of the human animal.

Joni Mitchell

An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child.

Joni Mitchell

I've got 50 different tunings in the guitar.

Joni Mitchell

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

Edith Piaf knocked my socks off when I was 8, but I didn't know what she was singing about.

Joni Mitchell

I used to be monastic, almost. Now I'm like a Tibetan that has discovered hamburgers and television. I'm catching up on Americana.

Joni Mitchell

Everyone I know has attention deficit, and they say it with great pride. It's a bad time to be right.

Joni Mitchell

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

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

When you're trying to pass on the best of the stuff you're culling to what should be a hungry culture but you have it diminished... that's kind of disappointing.

Joni Mitchell

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

Joni Mitchell

This is a nation that has lost the ability to be self-critical, and that makes a lie out of the freedoms.

Joni Mitchell

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

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

I have one piece of music, since 1997, and I don't see it having lyrics. Where does it go in this world? So I haven't recorded it.

Joni Mitchell