John Mellencamp

“This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it.”

“A lot of the time, I write in the third person, but I'm mostly describing my own ordeals. When those unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get free, you must defeat your ghosts.”

“I'm the guy who wrote The Authority Song. Did they think I was kidding? Did they think it was only a song to entertain?”

“In so many musicals today, the story is moved forward by a song. I don't think we're gonna try to do that.”

“If I laugh a couple of times a day, I'm doing good. People think it's their God-given right to be happy, and it's just not. It's something you've got to work at. I like to paint the human condition, and the human condition is not smiles and happy people.”

“'Jack & Diane' was originally about race. I was playing nightclubs, and I was seeing new American couples, mixed-race couples. I thought it was cool. The song was my effort to make a song about that, but of course the record-company guy didn't like it.”

“I'm your average Joe guy. I don't really care for politicians.”

“The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased.”

“I'm wide open and will entertain anything anybody has to say, but if it's MTV and radio, well, they're great things, but can't be the only thing. I don't know that it would work even for the Beatles.”

“A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.”

“Take 'Jack and Diane.' I was so disgusted with people thinking the line 'Hold on to sixteen as long as you can' meant to stay a teenager forever. What I meant was keep doing whatever makes you feel alive.”

“When you live in hysteria, people start thinking emotionally.”

“One quality of a good songwriter is to be vague. A vague notion, a vague image, but enough to give the listener the opportunity to make more out of what's being said than is there. That's the great thing about Bob Dylan's songs: We the listeners have made more out of them than he ever intended.”

“Everything I have is for sale. Material items are just things that pass through your hands that mean very little or nothing.”

“Natalie from the Dixie Chicks could have said what she said before 9-11 and no one would have cared.”

“'Crumbling' Down' is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president - he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.”

“All I'm doing is painting. It's my hobby. And that's that.”

“My task with 'Uh-Huh' was to make a more even record and get away from juvenile topics like 'Hurts So Good.' But I also knew if I wanted to continue, I had to have more hits.”

“I think it's ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don't buy my records. And there ain't that many teenagers out there in the marketplace.”

“We had an exercise in speech class in school, impromptu speaking, that I was always real good at.”