Joni Mitchell Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species.”

“I have an aversion to being mislabeled. Here's a label I'd accept: I'm an 'individual.' I'm someone who can't follow, and doesn't want to lead.”

“I see music as fluid architecture.”

“When the world becomes a massive mess with nobody at the helm, it's time for artists to make their mark.”

“But I have a tremendous will to live and a tremendous 'joie de vivre,' alternating with irritability.”

“The thing that gave me the most pain in life, psychologically, and it gave me tremendous pain psychologically, is man's disrespect for nature.”

“Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.”

“My childhood was very difficult. I had every childhood disease and then some, but my parents didn't mollycoddle me. They left me to fight those battles on my own. I guess that was very Canadian, very stoic. But it's good. I had to become a warrior. I had to give up hope and find a substitute for hope that would be far more stable.”

“You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining.”