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All Quotes by author - John Mellencamp

" All I'm doing is painting. It's my hobby. And that's that. "

" A lot of record company people, even though they're our age, want to be perceived as young hip guys, and they're hurting the business. "

" A lot of the time, I write in the third person, but I'm mostly describing my own ordeals. When those unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get free, you must defeat your ghosts. "

" A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song. "

" American folk songs were about tragedy, right? They were about suffering and tragedy, and a lot of my songs are about that, even though they were misunderstood. "

" A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness. "

" As I get older, I have a different look on life. I just try to be a little more tolerant and a little bit more centered about what's going on around me and not so emotional. "

" As I've matured as a songwriter, I realize that if it's out there, it's mine. "

" Bob Dylan's first couple of records in the 60's weren't considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album. "

" Broadway is a very different kind of place. It's kind of like Nashville in that there's a certain amount of people that are involved, and those people are what run it. "

" 'Crumbling' Down' is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president - he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor. "

" Do I think it's OK to fight authority as long as you're only talking about the high school teacher? No. "

" Everything I have is for sale. Material items are just things that pass through your hands that mean very little or nothing. "

" Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song. "

" For me to pretend I'm the keeper of the small town mentality or that's all I'm interested in is wrong. "

" Hanging out is a waste of time. The only time I would hang out was when I was a kid, I would hang out in the streets. But once I started making records, I stopped hanging out. "

" I believe in something, even if it's just me. "

" I couldn't have recorded this record 15 years ago. My voice didn't have the depth to pull these songs off. "

" I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines. "

" I don't want to be a politician. I don't like politics. It's petty; it fights dirty. "

" I ended up writing songs and growing up in public with my songwriting. And it's a good thing for me back then: in the early '70s, there was a thing called artist development, where an artist could find his feet, find himself, find his voice. I think I made five or six albums before I sold five or six albums. "

" If fans are going to turn on me because of this, they weren't my fans anyway. I couldn't betray a whole 25 years of record making and not do this. I had to. "

" If I laugh a couple of times a day, I'm doing good. People think it's their God-given right to be happy, and it's just not. It's something you've got to work at. I like to paint the human condition, and the human condition is not smiles and happy people. "

" If I'm painting, I paint every day. I'll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night. "

" If we have any hope for survival of the music that we all love, compassion must replace name-calling, fairness must replace greed, and we need to come together as a musical community and try to understand each other's problems. "

" If you hide information from people, don't want people to see the Ten Commandments or don't want people to hear about Darwin, aren't we hiding things that we know from our future generations? I just think that that's incorrect. "

" I have to say when a man lives for himself, it's hard to live with him. That's pretty much the story of all my divorces. I've been making records since I was 22 and done things my way, and it's hard for me to compromise. And of course, to have a successful relationship, one has to compromise. Sometimes I'm not good at it. "

" I just think if the song's good, sing it. I don't care who's doing it. I don't care if it's a country act. I don't care if it's a rock act. If the song's good, sing it. "

" I'm as left-wing as you can get. "

" I'm the guy who wrote The Authority Song. Did they think I was kidding? Did they think it was only a song to entertain? "

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