Top 50 Carly Simon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee.”

— Carly Simon

Featured in: Coffee Quotes

2. “Don’t mind if I fall apart. There’s more room in a broken heart.”

— Carly Simon

3. “A really strong woman accepts the war she went through and is ennobled by her scars.”

— Carly Simon

4. “I’ve learned that nobody’s perfect, and I don’t expect myself to be perfect anymore.”

— Carly Simon

5. “You’re so vain. I bet you think this song is about you.”

— Carly Simon

6. “Anticipation is making me late, it’s keeping me waiting.”

— Carly Simon

7. “I haven’t got time for the pain.”

— Carly Simon

8. “The sound of birds stops the noise in my mind.”

— Carly Simon

9. “I used the physical scar of my breast cancer operation, the scar that I have across my chest as a metaphor for all kinds of scars.”

— Carly Simon

10. “Everyone has problems, and learning to share them is essential. Hiding pain requires an enormous amount of energy; sharing it is liberating.”

— Carly Simon

11. “Besides, as Mark Twain once said, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”

— Carly Simon

12. “One of the things that has always motivated me to write is the desire to get it out and look at it in an objective way, so that it doesn’t cause me any serious pain by staying inside.”

— Carly Simon

13. “We change our opinions of ourselves so often. What the outside world thinks is only a small part of our image.”

— Carly Simon

14. “You usually can’t tell what’s inspiring until you look back on it.”

— Carly Simon

15. “We were enough with ourselves and our enormous little lives.”

— Carly Simon

16. “I’ve always thought of myself as being a warrior. When you actually have a battle, it’s better than when you don’t know who to fight.”

— Carly Simon

17. “My scar is beautiful. It looks like an arrow.”

— Carly Simon

18. “My father was a classical pianist, and my mother was a singer of just about everything.”

— Carly Simon

19. “We need role models who are going to break the mold.”

— Carly Simon

20. “You say we’ll soar like two birds through the clouds, but soon you’ll cage me on your shelf. I’ll never learn to be just me, first by myself.”

— Carly Simon

21. “But I’m lost when it comes to you.”

— Carly Simon

22. “There was a French singer, Francoise Hardy – I used to look at her pictures and try to dress like her.”

— Carly Simon

23. “Life is a dream even in its most painful moments, it’s a dream that we can dance to.”

— Carly Simon

24. “Undoubtedly, Patsy Cline was a trailblazer and in that respect, all women who are singular in a man’s field have a special power.”

— Carly Simon

25. “You know, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997 I realized I had spent too long arranging my attitude.”

— Carly Simon

26. “I had this terrible stammer, so I couldn’t really speak properly until I was 16 or 17.”

— Carly Simon

27. “It’s like The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat, about the discovery of penicillin. Out of these strange accidents come huge discoveries. A certain purple bleeds into red and all of a sudden you have something unexpected.”

— Carly Simon

28. “You know, people want to honor me, and on the one hand I just don’t want to be a poster child; but on the other, I want to do something classy and great – something where the residuals will go to the cause.”

— Carly Simon

29. “It didn’t matter as much because I’m a singer, not an actress, but my face is more acceptable in a way now than when I first came on the scene, because I’m part black.”

— Carly Simon

30. “I’ve gone through the village of my songwriting and my artistry, and I’ve gone through lots of different phases, including one where it has been very quiet and abandoned me for a few years.”

— Carly Simon

31. “I had a mastectomy in 1998, and then chemo.”

— Carly Simon

32. “As a singer I tried on all these hats, these voices, these clothes, and eventually out came me.”

— Carly Simon

33. “Then I went through a big Peggy Lee stage, then I became Annie Ross, then Judy Collins.”

— Carly Simon

34. “I just want to show off my scar proudly and not be afraid of it.”

— Carly Simon

35. “I always think it’s interesting to dig a little bit deeper every time you go to someplace that seems like a revelation or a strong connection to an emotional truth.”

— Carly Simon

36. “The models for me were more the folk-rock singers of the ’60s and ’70s.”

— Carly Simon

37. “We are in this period now where we all are trying to be in shape physically and deny ourselves any pleasure.”

— Carly Simon

38. “My look was even more solidified when I started singing in Greenwich Village with my sister Lucy. We wore matching dresses as the Simon Sisters.”

— Carly Simon

39. “We went to see all the shows. American musical theater and jazz were very big.”

— Carly Simon

40. “There’s always that peculiar thing that rescues you, the thing that’s so hard to name. If I were to locate and then identify all the hellish things we all have to go through in life in order to uncover one minute of happiness, it would take up a lot of space.”

— Carly Simon

41. “Well, I make every song I sing personal. I’ve never chosen a song that wasn’t.”

— Carly Simon

42. “The advancements that women have made are very threatening to men in the job place. There haven’t been that many women in politics. If you look at the conventions, it’s kind of pathetic how many men are the heads of companies. On the other hand, I’m not sure what the reality should be.”

— Carly Simon

43. “We are stardust, we are fallen and we’ve got to get back to the garden.”

— Carly Simon

44. “Worrying too much about other people’s ears and not my own, I lost my way.”

— Carly Simon

45. “Being in this business for as long as I’ve been in it, it’s sort of like living in a town or a city before the war and then after the war and then during the reconstruction and then during the time that it sprawls out to the malls.”

— Carly Simon

46. “I’m still more comfortable with standards than with my own songs.”

— Carly Simon

47. “I think that I’ve got some pretty bad reviews on albums or songs that later proved themselves.”

— Carly Simon

48. “I always sang standards because the songs I wrote for myself weren’t as easy to sing.”

— Carly Simon

49. “I remember being onstage once when I didn’t have fear: I got so scared I didn’t have fear that it brought on an anxiety attack.”

— Carly Simon

50. “You know when you take the paint off an old canvas and you discover that something’s been painted underneath it? That’s what I feel like – that part of the old is coming through the new.”

— Carly Simon