Joni Mitchell Writing Quotations

You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining.

I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.

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

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

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.

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

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

I hang my laundry on the line when I write.

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

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.