Top 200 Joni Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “No one likes to have less than they had before. That’s the nature of the human animal.”

— Joni Mitchell

152. “We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn’t like. It has no resemblance to democracy.”

— Joni Mitchell

153. “Some get the gravy, some get the gristle.”

— Joni Mitchell

154. “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.”

— Joni Mitchell

155. “Lazy reviewers look up other people’s reviews and they write the same thing, so you get people writing crap based on crap.”

— Joni Mitchell

156. “I’m not a pitiable creature. It’s just that I suffer very eloquently.”

— Joni Mitchell

157. “I sang in art school, just to get money to smoke.”

— Joni Mitchell

158. “What I do is unusual: chordal movements that have never been used before, changing keys and modalities mid-song.”

— Joni Mitchell

159. “Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.”

— Joni Mitchell

160. “It’s in my stars to invent; I was born on Madame Curie’s birthday. I have this need for originals, for innovation. That’s why I like Charlie Parker.”

— Joni Mitchell

161. “With a painting, you don’t have to go back and paint it again.”

— Joni Mitchell

162. “My life came down to being a granny and watching a lot of television.”

— Joni Mitchell

163. “I have a tremendous joie de vivre... alternating with irritability of course.”

— Joni Mitchell

164. “The songwriting was almost like something I did while I was waiting for my daughter to come back.”

— Joni Mitchell

165. “Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks.”

— Joni Mitchell

166. “White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa, rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn’t have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It’s basically militant.”

— Joni Mitchell

167. “My first four albums covered the usual youth problems – looking for love in all the wrong places – while the next five are basically about being in your 30s.”

— Joni Mitchell

168. “I never loved a man as far as I could pitch my shoe.”

— Joni Mitchell

169. “My style of songwriting is influenced by cinema. I’m a frustrated filmmaker. A fan once said to me, ‘Girl, you make me see pictures in my head!’ and I took that as a great compliment. That’s exactly my intention.”

— Joni Mitchell

170. “Do you want – do you want – do you want to dance with me baby?”

— Joni Mitchell

171. “I came through folk music simply because it was easy to get into it.”

— Joni Mitchell

172. “I’d had a rough childhood.”

— Joni Mitchell

173. “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.”

— Joni Mitchell

174. “How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.”

— Joni Mitchell

175. “Won’t you stay We’ll put on the day And we’ll talk in present tenses.”

— Joni Mitchell

176. “Love is a very hard feeling to keep alive. It’s a very fragile plant.”

— Joni Mitchell

177. “I conceived in art college at the age of 20, near the end of term.”

— Joni Mitchell

178. “Drag wasn’t always counterculture.”

— Joni Mitchell

179. “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

180. “There was this mountain village in Russia where my music was getting in on some German radio station. I remember this because music used to get up to Saskatchewan from Texas. Late at night after the local station closed down.”

— Joni Mitchell

181. “I do have this reputation for being a serious person.”

— Joni Mitchell

182. “People were very protective of me. Overly so. I was in the industry for a long time before I had any idea of what drugs people were doing.”

— Joni Mitchell

183. “I try not to steal from myself, but the modalities create similarities.”

— Joni Mitchell

184. “Daydreamin’ drugs the pain of living.”

— Joni Mitchell

185. “The coming of the kids hasn’t come out in my art yet.”

— Joni Mitchell

186. “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

187. “Some people are upset to see you doing ordinary things. Those people, if they were a celebrity, they would have an entourage.”

— Joni Mitchell

188. “For the first time in my career, I’m working in a fine-arts arena, so I’m finally getting some intelligent reviews.”

— Joni Mitchell

189. “A little lawyer on the tube, he said, its so easy now, anyone can sue.”

— Joni Mitchell

190. “If you see yourself as a kingly type, then you need your serfs and your army and someone around you.”

— Joni Mitchell

191. “I can’t remember anything I ever wrote.”

— Joni Mitchell

192. “The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music.”

— Joni Mitchell

193. “I have lost my credibility as a hit maker because of these side excursions into other branches of music by not being consistent. Consistency seems to be all important.”

— Joni Mitchell

194. “I’m drinking champagne, got the head phones up high, can’t numb you out.”

— Joni Mitchell

195. “Rolling Stone hates me. They must have an editorial policy to do me in for many years.”

— Joni Mitchell

196. “In terms of fiction, I’d rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.”

— Joni Mitchell

197. “And the seasons they go round and round.”

— Joni Mitchell

198. “I’m a method actress in my songs, which is why it’s hard to sing them.”

— Joni Mitchell

199. “Musically, I would never run dry. Any time I sit down to an instrument, I could write a song.”

— Joni Mitchell

200. “I’m a fine artist working in a commercial arena, so that’s my cross to bear.”

— Joni Mitchell