Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I lost my daughter at 21. I had to give her up because I was broke, no place to take her, no money to take her. That was very traumatic.
I assume there must be some kind of genetic thrust. My two grandmothers were very different, but both of them were frustrated musicians.
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.
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.
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.
The thing that gave me the most pain in life, psychologically, and it gave me tremendous pain psychologically, is man's disrespect for nature.
I've looked at life from both sides now...from win and lose, and still somehow it's life's illusions I recall I really don't know life at all.
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.
Yesterday a child came out to wonder Caught a dragonfly inside a jar Fearful when the sky was full of thunder And tearful at the falling of a star
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.
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.
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.
But now old friends are acting strange They shake their heads, they say I've changed Well something's lost, but something's gained In living every day
In search of love and music My whole life has been Illumination Corruption And diving, diving, diving, diving, Diving down to pick up every shiny thing
You know that it never has been easy Whether you do or do not resign Whether you travel the breadth of the extremities Or stick to some straighter line.
But you know it's hard to tell When you're in the spell if it's wrong or if it's real But you're bound to lose If you let the blues get you scared to feel
I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate.
I wanna be strong, I wanna laugh along, I wanna belong to the living. Alive, alive, I wanna get up and jive, Wanna wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive.
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.
Keep a good heart. That's the most important thing in life. It's not how much money you make or what you can acquire. The art of it is to keep a good heart.
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.
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.
When you're trying to pass on the best of the stuff you're culling to what should be a hungry culture but you have it diminished... that's kind of disappointing.
Bob [Dylan] is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.
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.
Just before our love got lost you said "I am as constant as a northern star" And I said, constantly in the darkness, Where's that at? If you want me I'll be in the bar.
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.
I met a woman She had a mouth like yours She knew your life She knew your devils and your deeds And she said "Go to him, stay with him if you can But be prepared to bleed
You know, Neil Young is singing Rock n' roll will never die, and Neil never rocked and rolled in his life. I mean, he rocked, but he didn't roll. He has got no swing in him.
They paved paradise and put up a parkin lot With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got till it's gone
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.
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.
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.
When I was 19 I went to art school. I had six months of teaching myself to play baritone ukulele under my belt so I was sort of a novice folkie... I was singing folk songs at that time.
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.
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.
Freedom to me is a luxury of being able to follow the path of the heart, to keep the magic in your life. Freedom is necessary for me in order to create, and if I cannot create I don’t feel alive.
I didn't think I had much of a following in the South. I thought I was anonymous down there so I kept to the South. But I found in certain pockets that I was quite recognizable and I just hit a wig store.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the seasons they go 'round and 'round And the painted ponies go up and down We're captive on the carousel of time We can't return we can only look behind From where we came And go round and round and round In the circle game.
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.
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.
The rock & roll industry is very incestuous, and we have all been close at one time or another. A lot of beautiful music and a lot of beautiful times came from that. A lot of pain, too, because, inevitably, different relationships broke up.
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.
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.
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.