Joni Mitchell Quotes

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.

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.”

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.

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.

(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.

We are stardust, We are golden, And we’ve got to get ourselves Back to the garden.

Laughing and crying, you know it's the same release.

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.

I've got nervous energy like a kid, still.

Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone. They paved paradise, And put up a parking lot.

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.

In our possessive coupling So much could not be expressed So now I'm returning to myself These things that you and I suppressed.

I think if you’re healthy, aging can be quite a beautiful process, and I think we’ve created an artificial problem for ourselves.

…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…

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.