Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

John Mellencamp

Related Quotes:

" 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? "

John Mellencamp

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

John Mellencamp

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

John Mellencamp

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

John Mellencamp

" 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. "

John Mellencamp

" 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. "

John Mellencamp

" 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

" 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

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

John Mellencamp

" I'm your average Joe guy. I don't really care for politicians. "

John Mellencamp

" I was one of those guys, you know, playing and singing, and there was no reason for me to write a song, because there were so many beautiful songs out. And Bob Dylan was always the ultimate songwriter, and nobody could ever write a song as good as him, and nobody ever has written a song as good as him. "

John Mellencamp

" I used to think that eating healthy was ordering a fish sandwich at McDonalds. "

John Mellencamp

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

John Mellencamp

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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 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

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

John Mellencamp

" 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. "

John Mellencamp

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

John Mellencamp

" 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

" 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. "

John Mellencamp

" Life should never be viewed from the vantage point of achievements. It is total folly. "

John Mellencamp

" 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

" I've just been fortunate to havehad a lot of hit records, though Human Wheels doesn't qualify as a hit record-but it's really the best single I've ever had. "

John Mellencamp

" Oh, I think country has changed tremendously. I think country has totally changed. Country music when I was a kid was Hank Williams. If you put Hank and Elvis together, there wasn't that musical difference. But as the Beatles showed up and the English invasion, I think country music got pretty far away from rock n' roll. "

John Mellencamp