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" Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don't care whose fault it is, it's the truth. "
John Mellencamp
Truth
Time
Great
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" When politicians use fear, they are playing into the enemy's hand. "
John Mellencamp
Fear
Enemy
Playing
" I think it's ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don't buy my records. And there ain't that many teenagers out there in the marketplace. "
John Mellencamp
Ridiculous
Sell
Teenagers
" I wanted to study at the Art Students League in New York when I was young, but I didn't have the money. Then I was fortunate enough to become Johnny Cougar Mellencamp. At the time, I thought I'd make a couple of records and get back to painting. It never dawned on me that I'd be 64 years old and still making music. "
John Mellencamp
Money
Art
Time
" 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. "
John Mellencamp
Song
Songs
Other
" I wish my grandmother and grandfather were still alive, because they were able to keep me grounded. "
John Mellencamp
Keep
Grandmother
Me
" Natalie from the Dixie Chicks could have said what she said before 9-11 and no one would have cared. "
John Mellencamp
Would
Before
Could
" 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. "
John Mellencamp
Greed
Expectation
Sales
" We had an exercise in speech class in school, impromptu speaking, that I was always real good at. "
John Mellencamp
Class
School
Good
" Life should never be viewed from the vantage point of achievements. It is total folly. "
John Mellencamp
Folly
Point
Life
" '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. "
John Mellencamp
Green
Friend
Political
" Music was so important to the culture when I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies. We just expected that Bob Dylan was going to make a great record, and it was normal. It was like, 'Okay, here's another great record by Bob Dylan; here's another great record by Led Zeppelin.' "
John Mellencamp
Culture
Okay
Music
" I thought I knew a lot about music. Then you start digging and the deeper you go, the more there is. "
John Mellencamp
Music
Start
Thought
" 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. "
John Mellencamp
Mind
Ghosts
Defeat
" 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. "
John Mellencamp
Art
Money
New York
" I used to think that eating healthy was ordering a fish sandwich at McDonalds. "
John Mellencamp
Think
Fish
Healthy
" 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. "
John Mellencamp
Saying
You
Need
" 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. "
John Mellencamp
Great Things
Work
Great
" 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. "
John Mellencamp
I Can
Songs
Worry
" This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it. "
John Mellencamp
Rock
Emote
Write
" Do I think it's OK to fight authority as long as you're only talking about the high school teacher? No. "
John Mellencamp
School
Fight
Long
" 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. "
John Mellencamp
Afraid
Fail
Happen
" This cycle of make a record, tour has been going on for 20 years now. I don't even know why I do it sometimes. Do I need more money? Do I need more platinum and gold records? The only thing I can think of is ego. "
John Mellencamp
Know
Ego
Think
" 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. "
John Mellencamp
Thought
Wealth
People
" I believe in something, even if it's just me. "
John Mellencamp
Believe
I Believe
Me
" 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. "
John Mellencamp
Good
Think
Voice
" My grandmother made sure that I went to church every Sunday. And she'd come over and pick us boys up, and we would go to the Nazarene church. And back then, that was about as close to heaven as I ever got, because just the time to be able to spend with her, and she was very, very religious. "
John Mellencamp
Time
Sunday
She
" We could walk 3 minutes and be on the beach. I think the music kind of suffered because of it. It kind of smelled like Jimmy Buffett, which is a bad thing. "
John Mellencamp
Beach
Music
Think
" 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. "
John Mellencamp
Right
Tragedy
American
" Regret should be handled swiftly, and you shouldn't hold onto it. People spend their entire lives regretting what they didn't do and what they should've done. Hey, man, you did what you did. "
John Mellencamp
Man
Regret
People
" I don't want to be a politician. I don't like politics. It's petty; it fights dirty. "
John Mellencamp
Like
Dirty
Petty