Linda Ronstadt Quotes

I think there's mind in nature. There's a power in nature, and there's a universal power that you'd better not ignore.

I think musicians are always supportive of each other because they want the groove to keep going on. They just basically want to play music.

What I think is the universal, wonderful thing about music, is that it's very inclusive.

In committing to artistic growth, you have to refine your skills to support your instincts.

People don't realize that by voting Republican, they voted against themselves....I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don't know anything about the Iraqis, but they're angry and frustrated in their own lives. It's like Germany, before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we've got a new bunch of Hitlers.

Even though I know how very far apart we are, it helps to think we might be wishing underneath the same bright star.

I think it was a modest thing I did (Fahrenheit 9/11) ... this is an election year ... I'm not telling them how to vote. I'm saying get information about the issues ... at first there's just silence, then there's 'Yeah!' and then there's 'Boo' ... I have never seen a reaction like this, in all my years of touring ... Clear Channel can't threaten to not play my records because they are not going to play them anyway.

My feeling is that the beaches should belong to everybody. Nobody should be able to build anything. It causes erosion. It's a bad thing altogether.

The dream world of sleep and the dream world of music are not far apart. I often catch glimpses of one as I pass through a door to the other, like encountering a neighbor in the hallway going into the apartment next to one’s own. In the recording studio, I would often lie down to nap and wake up with harmony parts fully formed in my mind, ready to be recorded. I think of music as dreaming in sound.

People have often written about me, that I did this for this reason and that for that reason, and theyre usually 98 percent wrong.

I never went to the Beatles' concerts to scream. I never screamed at anybody's show. I was on my feet with the entire, all of the crowned heads of Motown, and we were shrieking our guts out.

The only reason to be with somebody is that they make you a better person and you make them a better person.

I thought everybody could sing, because everybody in my family could.

Up until about a hundred years ago, the world was dark at night. You got to have a real night so you could sleep.

I think there's just a lot of compassion in art. Again, when you're doing something that resonates with somebody else, you're going through an experience another person has had, whether it's been a painful experience or a joyous experience or a happy experience.

In the United States, we spend millions of dollars on sports because it promotes teamwork, discipline, and the experience of learning to make great progress in small increments. Learning to play music does all this and more.

Music is a work in progress. On a record, it gets frozen in time. And it's oddly unnatural.

Music should be an elective experience. You should go, "I'm going to sit down and listen to some Beethoven, by God," and then you get to hear it.

I get on the airplane and there's a screen in front of everything. You get into a taxicab in New York, there's a screen blinking at you. I think it's going to have a tremendous effect on our brains, because those bright, saturated colors and those strong lines, they do things to your brain.

I think that Frank Sinatra was maybe the greatest pop singer.

We were raised with the idea that we had limitless chances and we got very shocked to learn that wasn't the case.

A lot of singers that I've heard that I may not like their sensibility, but I see that they're entitled to whatever they get. People don't get there without talent, they really don't.

If you don't have story to tell the public at large - you have to be able to sort of go listen.

When I was taking arithmetic in the first grade I said to myself, "I'm going to be a singer. I don't have to worry about numbers." I didn't think I was going to be famous or a star.

Life's full of loss, who knows the cost, living in the memory of the love that never was.

I think the zenith of popular songwriting to the United States of America was that period that started in the '20s and went into the '50s. It was the period of the great American standard song.

Someone once asked me why people sing. I answered that they sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day. Perhaps more than the birds do, humans hold a grudge. They sing to complain of how grievously they have been wronged, and how to avoid it in the future. They sing to help themselves execute a job of work. They sing so the subsequent generations won’t forget what the current generation endured, or dreamed, or delighted in.

Story is what's most important.

I first knew Laurie Lewis by her considerable reputation as a fiddle player and a writer of songs. When an opportunity came along to sing with her I seized it. Getting to know her as a singer and a person has been pure pleasure. Her voice is a rare combination of grit and grace, strength and delicacy. Her stories are always true.

Everybody has their own level of doing their music. ... Mine just happened to resonate over the years, in one way and another, with a significant enough number of people so that I could do it professionally.

I think if the United States gave anything to culture at large in the 20th century, the most important contribution made was the popular song.

I was never bored because I always had a book. So I had a doorway into another world or another universe. It was great.

I dont think you can look for love. All you can do is get yourself in a situation where you dont discourage something that may be rather nice.

American radio from the '30s through the '60s was just fabulous. There was such a diversity.

The essential elements of singing are voice, musicianship, and story. It is the rare artist that has all three in abundance.

I can't draw. But I can draw with sound. That's the most useful thing I learned in terms of what my craft is... The arrangements were mine. They were little lines and stuff that I had written myself... And I was locked into this idea that vocals didn't count, melodies didn't count, songwriting craftsmanship didn't count. The only thing that counted was high arching guitar solos...

I don't record (any type of genre of music) that I didn't hear in my family's living room by the time I was 10. It just is my rule that I don't break because ... I can't do it authentically ... I really think that you're just hard-wiring (synapses) in your brain up until the age of maybe 12 or 10, and there are certain things you can't learn in an authentic way after that.

When you sing the same song over and over and over again, it stops meaning what it originally meant to you. It starts sounding like white noise, or my washing machine.

Mainly, when I ran into Emmylou Harris, that was it, you know? We could finish each other's sentences musically, and personally, too. We have a very shared, similar sensibility. And that was a friendship that really opened up a tremendous number of musical doors for me.

I believe in the empirical wisdom of science, just to start with, so I hope that there might be some treatment out there that might be helpful.

Cocaine made people deaf, it made people dead and it made people real obnoxious.

Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight, someone's thinking of me and loving me tonight.

Marijuana has a lot of very good medical uses, and I truly believe it should be legal, but for just recreational use it wasn't my drug. I didn't like it.

Music isn't just for professionals. We delegate all of our music and our dancing and our art to professionals. It's silly. We should be doing our own dancing and drawing.

I can sing better after shooting smack in both arms than after eating too much.

My feeling about school was that it interfered with my reading.

Art is for healing ourselves, and everybody needs their own personal art to heal up their problems.

Being an entertainer, especially in times like these, is really a public service.