Great Throughts Treasury

"You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone."

"No one likes to have less than they had before. That's the nature of the human animal. "

"The more decadent a culture gets, the more they have a need for what they don't have at all, which is innocence, so you end up with kiddie porn and a perverse obsession with youth."

"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."

"How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open, I think, to encounter and to, in a way, be in touch with the miraculous."

"I had difficulty at one point accepting my affluence, and my success, even the expression of it seemed to me distasteful at one time, like to suddenly be driving a fancy car. I had a lot of soul searching to do. I felt that living in elegance and luxury cancelled creativity, or even some of that sort of Sundayschool philosophy that luxury comes as a guest and then becomes the master. That was a philosophy that I held onto. I still had that stereotyped idea that success would deter it, that luxury would make you too comfortable and complacent and that the gift would suffer from it. But I found that I was able to express it in the work, even at the time when it was distasteful to me... The only way that I could reconcile with myself and my art was to say, ?This is what I?m going through now; my life is changing. I show up at the gig in a big limousine and that?s a fact of life.?"

"I live in a beautiful place, like it would be a dream place. Many a day I walk through it and don?t see anything... If I have to live with less, I can do it easily. I can live with much less. As a matter of fact, for my nature, it?s too complicated to have so much because I can never find anything. [laughs] That?s a silly little problem but you don?t need that much. It?s a big headache... I like the luxury of having a swimming pool. But if I could have a shack or a tent down there next to my swimming pool, I?d be very contented. [laughs]"

"I think that as long as you still have questions, the child questions, the muse has got to be there. You throw a question up to the muse and maybe they drop something back on you."

"I?m an extremist as far as lifestyle goes. I need to live simply and primitively sometimes, at least for short periods of the year, in order to keep in touch with something more basic. But I have come to be able to finally enjoy my success, and to use it as a form of self-expression. Leonard Cohen has a line that says, Do not dress in those rags for me, I know you are not poor. When I heard that line, I thought to myself that I had been denying, which was hypocritical. I had been denying, just as that line in that song, I had played down my wealth."

"I?m still searching for meaning and purpose. You know, people have a funny idea that success, [that] luxury is the end of the road. That?s not the end at all. As a matter of fact, many troubles begin there. They?re just of a different nature."

"I?ve never thought of that. I guess the only thing was being witness to my own growth. You know, I would suddenly see that, yes, the music was getting better, and the words were getting better. Just my own sense of creative growth kept me going, I guess."

"Many people in the rock business [have] their patched jeans and their Levi jackets, which is a comfortable way to dress, but also it?s a way of keeping yourself aligned with your audience. For instance, if you were to show up at a rock and roll concert dressed in gold lam‚ and all of your audience was in Salvation Army discards, you would feel like a person apart."

"My growth has been slow, like a crescendo of growth, based on my dissatisfaction with the previous project, where I thought was weak, not what the critics thought. The critics dismissed a lot of what I thought was my growth and praised a lot of what I thought common about my work. I disagreed with most of them. So I had to rely a lot on my own opinions, not to say that I wasn?t constantly asking them for advice and mulling it around, not dismissing it."

"When Maron notes that "once you?ve known poverty, it digs into you no matter how successful," Mitchell agrees and admits to being "suspicious of wealth" because she had come from destitution. Looking back on that tipping point when she went from struggling artist to star, with the affluent lifestyle to boot, she contemplates the inner tussle of values:"

"You read those books where luxury comes as a guest to take a slave. Books where artists in noble poverty go like virgins to the grave. Don?t you get sensitive on me ?cause I know you?re just too proud. You couldn?t step outside the Boho dance now even if good fortune allowed. Like a priest with a pornographic watch looking and longing on the sly, sure it?s stricken from your uniform but you can?t get it out of your eyes."