Top 200 Joni Mitchell Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Heaven’s full of astronauts and the Lord’s on death row.”

— Joni Mitchell

102. “We’ll laugh and toast to nothing, and smash our empty glasses down.”

— Joni Mitchell

103. “The thing that started me painting originally was seeing Bambi when I was about nine. I was incredibly disturbed by the forest fire that killed Bambi’s mother, and that distress gave me the impulse to create something, as a way of dealing with it.”

— Joni Mitchell

104. “Morgellons is constantly morphing. There are times when it’s directly attacking the nervous system, as if you’re being bitten by fleas and lice. It’s all in the tissue and it’s not a hallucination. It was eating me alive, sucking the juices out. I’ve been sick all my life.”

— Joni Mitchell

105. “Because Elvis gave ’em cars, you think I’m cheap.”

— Joni Mitchell

106. “I like my freedom. I like to do my own grocery shopping. People do recognize you. They are kind of shocked. Some people like it. It makes them feel at ease. It confirms their hopes that you are in fact similar to them.”

— Joni Mitchell

107. “I get the same charge from juxtaposition of colors as I do from juxtaposition of chords.”

— Joni Mitchell

108. “My parents told me I’d point to a bed of flowers and say ‘Pink. Pretty,’ before I knew any other words.”

— Joni Mitchell

109. “The thing that gave me the most pain in life, psychologically, and it gave me tremendous pain psychologically, is man’s disrespect for nature.”

— Joni Mitchell

110. “Richard got married to a figure skater, and he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator.”

— Joni Mitchell

111. “All I really, really want our love to do is to bring out the best in me and in you too.”

— Joni Mitchell

112. “I’m not a kiss-and-teller. I never named names.”

— Joni Mitchell

113. “You wake up one day and suddenly realize that your youth is behind you, even though you’re still young at heart.”

— Joni Mitchell

114. “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.”

— Joni Mitchell

115. “I never really wanted to be a star. I didn’t like entering a room with all eyes on me. I still don’t really like the attention of a birthday party.”

— Joni Mitchell

116. “I prefer Christmas, which is everybody’s holiday. It’s just my nature. I don’t like to be zeroed in on en masse.”

— Joni Mitchell

117. “When you reach that kind of successful pinnacle, it is the nature of the business and the press and everything that they go about tearing you down.”

— Joni Mitchell

118. “My husband had an education. He had a degree in Literature. I married into a camp of literary types.”

— Joni Mitchell

119. “There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.”

— Joni Mitchell

120. “I come from pioneer stock, developers of the West, people who went out into the wilderness and set up home with nothing but a pair of oxen.”

— Joni Mitchell

121. “You’ve got to shake your fists at lightning now. You’ve got to roar like forest fire.”

— Joni Mitchell

122. “Buddy Holly and the early rock ‘n’ roll was no lighter than the way I play. It’s very minimal.”

— Joni Mitchell

123. “I am a woman of heart and mind, looking for affection and respect, a little passion.”

— Joni Mitchell

124. “My family could only afford to get me the box of eight Crayola crayons, but I craved the one with all 24 colours. I wanted magenta and turquoise and silver and gold.”

— Joni Mitchell

125. “A few drinks later you’re not so choosy when the closing lights strip off the shadows on this strange new flesh you’ve found.”

— Joni Mitchell

126. “All my battles were with male egos. I’m just looking for equality, not to dominate. But I want to be able to control my vision.”

— Joni Mitchell

127. “They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum.”

— Joni Mitchell

128. “You’ve got to keep the child alive; you can’t create without it.”

— Joni Mitchell

129. “Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm. They cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable, or mineral.”

— Joni Mitchell

130. “He’s swept with the broom of contempt and the rooms have an empty ring.”

— Joni Mitchell

131. “Inside your own self pity there you swim, in sinking down to drown her voice still haunts you, and only with your laughter can you win.”

— Joni Mitchell

132. “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

133. “I got in before SoHo was SoHo. It was just Little Italy when I was in there. It’s still off the touristy track. It’s just away from the Saturday action, the crowds and everything. It’s too expensive. It’s insane. You’ve got to be a billionaire to live on Manhattan now.”

— Joni Mitchell

134. “I like my freedom. I like to do my own grocery shopping.”

— Joni Mitchell

135. “I certainly don’t want to be an angry old artist.”

— Joni Mitchell

136. “I’m an individual, and an individual can’t follow and doesn’t want to lead.”

— Joni Mitchell

137. “All the news of home you read, more about the war and of bloody changes.”

— Joni Mitchell

138. “We call for the three great stimulants of the exhausted ones, artifice, brutality, and innocence.”

— Joni Mitchell

139. “You win the lasting laurels with your laughter.”

— Joni Mitchell

140. “I like to move around. I travel. I’ve driven across country by myself.”

— Joni Mitchell

141. “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.”

— Joni Mitchell

142. “I never saw a sky so green, never so blue.”

— Joni Mitchell

143. “Once I got the open tunings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. Once I got some interesting chords to play with, my writing began to come.”

— Joni Mitchell

144. “Because I’m so busy and because I think of myself as a painter, I desperately guard the time that I have to paint. And sometimes I’m irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.”

— Joni Mitchell

145. “I don’t like being too looked up at or too looked down on. I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshipped or spat out.”

— Joni Mitchell

146. “I’m a painter first, and a musician second.”

— Joni Mitchell

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

— Joni Mitchell

148. “I didn’t like the sound of people gasping at the mere mention of my name. It horrified me.”

— Joni Mitchell

149. “Van Gogh was impulsive.”

— Joni Mitchell

150. “When the spirit of child’s play enters into the creative process, it’s a wonderful force and something to be nurtured.”

— Joni Mitchell