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" 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. "

John Mellencamp

Love

Community

Compassion

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" Sound quality was supposed to be one of the big selling points for CDs but, as we know, it wasn't very good at all. It was just another con, a get-rich-quick scheme, a monumental hoax perpetrated on the music consuming public. "

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

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" The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased. "

" People have the right to say what they want to. "

" Radio was my friend after 'Jack & Diane' and 'Hurts So Good.' "

" When people are afraid, they make emotional decisions. "

" I want my paintings to look like they were found in a garage. If they get a scratch or a hole in them, it just becomes part of the painting. "

" 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. "

" One quality of a good songwriter is to be vague. A vague notion, a vague image, but enough to give the listener the opportunity to make more out of what's being said than is there. That's the great thing about Bob Dylan's songs: We the listeners have made more out of them than he ever intended. "

" My best songs come from a place outside myself. "

" When you live in hysteria, people start thinking emotionally. "

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

John Mellencamp

Dirty

Petty

" 'Jack & Diane' was originally about race. I was playing nightclubs, and I was seeing new American couples, mixed-race couples. I thought it was cool. The song was my effort to make a song about that, but of course the record-company guy didn't like it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

John Mellencamp

Two

First

" We had an exercise in speech class in school, impromptu speaking, that I was always real good at. "

" What's the difference? One guy's the same as the other. "

" My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material. "

" This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it. "

" What is there to be afraid of? The worst thing that can happen is you fail. So what? I failed at a lot of things. My first record was horrible. "

" I went to New York in 1974, to either try to get a record deal, get into the New York Art Student League, or be a dancer. So that was my plan. Some plan. And I had no money. "

" You cannot expect the guy who drove the car into the ditch to navigate it out of the ditch. You have to put a new driver in the seat. I'm not saying the new driver is going to be any better, but we need a new driver. Kerry is the only choice. "

" I'm wide open and will entertain anything anybody has to say, but if it's MTV and radio, well, they're great things, but can't be the only thing. I don't know that it would work even for the Beatles. "

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" When politicians use fear, they are playing into the enemy's hand. "