A biography for Joni Mitchellhasn’t been written yet.
“You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit's foot of their particular religion. You don't really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life.”
“I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.”
“Fame is a series of misunderstandings surrounding a name.”
“I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.”
“Everyone I know has attention deficit, and they say it with great pride. It's a bad time to be right.”
“I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance.”
“I think I would go further into fine arts, I think, if I were to continue.”
“you dont know what you got till its gone”
“I love to dance.”
“I used to be monastic, almost. Now I'm like a Tibetan that has discovered hamburgers and television. I'm catching up on Americana.”
“I know my generation - a lot of them, they're getting old now, and they want to think back fondly, they want to kid themselves. A lot of them think, 'Yeah, we were the best.' That's the kiss of death. That's non-growth. And also that's very bad for the world.”
“The thing that gave me the most pain in life, psychologically, and it gave me tremendous pain psychologically, is man's disrespect for nature.”
“You wake up one day and suddenly realize that your youth is behind you, even though you're still young at heart.”
“I believe that I am male and I am female.”
“If I'm censoring for anyone, it's for my parents. They are very old-fashioned and moral people. They still don't understand me that well.”
“My name had gone stale, and no matter how progressive I got, it was my time to die.”
“I can't remember anything I ever wrote.”