At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.
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

Buddy Holly and the early rock 'n' roll was no lighter than the way I play. It's very minimal.
Joni Mitchell

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

I can't remember anything I ever wrote.
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

I hate show business.
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

I learned a woman is never an old woman.
Joni Mitchell

I think I would go further into fine arts, I think, if I were to continue.
Joni Mitchell

I've got 50 different tunings in the guitar.
Joni Mitchell

Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.
Joni Mitchell

My name had gone stale, and no matter how progressive I got, it was my time to die.
Joni Mitchell

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

Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block.
Joni Mitchell

Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped!
Joni Mitchell

Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.
Joni Mitchell

The Beginning of Survival is my best album. I am very proud of it, and I am surprised at it, too. I thought some of Travelogue was a little heavy, but I don't think this is heavy.
Joni Mitchell

The more decadent a culture gets, the more they have a need for what they don't have at all, which is innocence, so you end up with kiddie porn and a perverse obsession with youth.
Joni Mitchell