Top 200 Joni Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 5

51. “You snipe so steady, you snub so snide, so rip and ready to diminish and deride.”

— Joni Mitchell

52. “Some turn to Jesus and some turn to heroin.”

— Joni Mitchell

53. “Edith Piaf knocked my socks off when I was 8, but I didn’t know what she was singing about.”

— Joni Mitchell

54. “America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It’s grotesquely mentally ill.”

— Joni Mitchell

55. “I’m a very analytical person, a somewhat introspective person; that’s the nature of the work I do.”

— Joni Mitchell

56. “In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.”

— Joni Mitchell

57. “Fear is like the wilderland – Stepping stones or sinking sand.”

— Joni Mitchell

58. “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; hes very misunderstood. Hes a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.”

— Joni Mitchell

59. “I could drink a case of you.”

— Joni Mitchell

60. “I think I would go further into fine arts, I think, if I were to continue.”

— Joni Mitchell

61. “Applause, applause, life is our cause.”

— Joni Mitchell

62. “I’ve got 50 different tunings in the guitar.”

— Joni Mitchell

63. “Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I knew there was milk and toast and honey and a bowl of oranges, too.”

— Joni Mitchell

64. “I see music as fluid architecture.”

— Joni Mitchell

65. “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

66. “I always thought the women of song don’t get along, and I don’t know why that is.”

— Joni Mitchell

67. “Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped!”

— Joni Mitchell

68. “An artist needs a certain amount of turmoil and confusion.”

— Joni Mitchell

69. “The God of the Old Testament is the depiction of evil.”

— Joni Mitchell

70. “We’re captive on the carousel of time, we can’t return we can only look behind.”

— Joni Mitchell

71. “During times like these, the wise are influential.”

— Joni Mitchell

72. “I learned from admiration and osmosis.”

— Joni Mitchell

73. “Fame is a series of misunderstandin gs surrounding a name.”

— Joni Mitchell

74. “Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block.”

— Joni Mitchell

75. “Sunlight will renew your pride.”

— Joni Mitchell

76. “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

77. “The most important thing is to write in your own blood. I bare intimate feelings because people should know how other people feel.”

— Joni Mitchell

78. “They’ll crucify you for staying the same, and they’ll crucify you for change. I’d rather be crucified for changing.”

— Joni Mitchell

79. “Unlike some of my peers, I haven’t really hit a writer’s block. When I hit a block I just paint, which is an old crop rotation trick.”

— Joni Mitchell

80. “I thrive on change. That’s probably why my chord changes are weird, because chords depict emotions. They’ll be going along on one key and I’ll drop off a cliff, and suddenly they will go into a whole other key signature. That will drive some people crazy, but that’s how my life is.”

— Joni Mitchell

81. “I met a redneck on a Grecian isle who did the Goat Dance very well.”

— Joni Mitchell

82. “Acid, booze, and ass, needles, guns, and grass, lots of laughs.”

— Joni Mitchell

83. “Fly silly sea bird, no dreams can possess you, no voices can blame you for sun on your wings.”

— Joni Mitchell

84. “The pirate he will sink you with a kiss, he’ll steal your heart and sail away.”

— Joni Mitchell

85. “The only thing I have to give to make you smile, to win you with, are all the mornings still to live.”

— Joni Mitchell

86. “Does the moon play only silver when it strums the galaxy?”

— Joni Mitchell

87. “Do you see how you hurt me, baby? So I hurt you too. Then we both get so blue. I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, looking for the key to set me free.”

— Joni Mitchell

88. “They used to laugh at me when I refused to ride on all those double decker buses, all because there was no driver on the top.”

— Joni Mitchell

89. “She’ll prophesy your death. She won’t say when.”

— Joni Mitchell

90. “I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.”

— Joni Mitchell

91. “Everybody’s saying hell’s the hippest way to go. Well, I don’t think so, but I’m gonna take a look around it though.”

— Joni Mitchell

92. “Innocence is drowned in anarchy. The best lack conviction given time to think, and the worst are full of passion without mercy.”

— Joni Mitchell

93. “I am as constant as a northern star.”

— Joni Mitchell

94. “He saw my complications and he mirrored me back simplified, and we laughed how our perfect world would always be denied.”

— Joni Mitchell

95. “Rachmaninoff made a musician out of me. His ‘Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini’ was the piece that sent me into raptures. It spoke to me. To me, it was a tender entreaty for the misunderstood.”

— Joni Mitchell

96. “Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.”

— Joni Mitchell

97. “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.”

— Joni Mitchell

98. “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

99. “You feed it all your woes, the ghostly garden grows.”

— Joni Mitchell

100. “I see the entire world as Eden, and every time you take an inch of it away, you must do so with respect.”

— Joni Mitchell