Janis Ian Quotes
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The best thing you can learn from the worst times of your life is that it always gets better. It may take a month, a year, a decade, but it will get better if you leave yourself open to it.
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I learned the truth at seventeen, That love was meant for beauty queens, And high school girls with clear skinned smiles, Who married young and then retired.
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I write a lot from instinct. But as you're writing out of instinct, once you reach a certain level as a songwriter, the craft is always there talking to you in the back of your head...that tells you when it's time to go to the chorus, when it's time to rhyme. Real basic craft... it's second nature.
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The money when you're having a hit is great, but money can be taken from you. What can't be taken from you is the talent and the effect your work has.
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It's neat to have finally reached a point where I can accept what I was and what I am.
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At the end of the day, all you can hope for is to go on. The older I get, the more I realize that just keeping on keeping on is what life's all about.
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Did you have an awesome time? Did you drink awesome shooters, listen to awesome music, and then just sit around and soak up each others awesomeness?
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I don't pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing. If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my walletand check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing's missing.
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Truth is not the enemy and whatever does not kill us, sets us free.
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I had a vague idea of the song's impact in the '60s, but that was tempered by the hate mail and threats I was receiving. It was only about ten years ago, when I finally put it back in my show because so many people were asking for it, that I understood 'Society's Child' real impact.
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Artists are taught to be humble about their impact, especially in folk music. It's so ingrained that I have a hard time even thinking I had any impact other than what a normal hit song would have.
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I think one of the reasons musicians keep doing what they do and writers keep doing what they do, is that we're totally unsuited for anything else. And I for one am much too lazy.
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I've always been an avid reader. If I don't have a book in the car, I'll stop and pick one up just to have something to read. I don't even remember learning to read.
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I feel I was born with the music coming to me, and that's not something to be wasted.
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Those of us with ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces, desperately remained at home, inventing lovers on the phone.
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Dreams were all they gave for free to ugly duckling girls like me.
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Going off the road just leaves me more time to be a writer.
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I played for anybody and everybody from the time I started playing guitar, when I was 10 or 11.
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I think I grew up, stopped worrying about what people thought of me, and whether things were going to turn out OK. I'm concentrating on doing the best work I can do and letting it go at that.
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Society's Child' was a real hard record to start with. That's all you want is for you to put your first record out and have people screaming at you in the streets. But it taught me right away that what I was doing was valuable and important.
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I love seeing teachers outside of school. It's like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs.
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I gave guitar lessons. I tried to join bands. My mom always said it was obvious that nothing was going to stop me.
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Once you're halfway home, you know that you can probably get the rest of the way there.
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It seems to be part of the human condition to need someone you can look down on. I still don't get that one.
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I'm a huge Peter Mayer fan, but only when I don't feel like killing him for being so good. I love Peter's work, though it irritates me that he plays so much better than I do. If I rocked half as hard as Peter does, I'd own the world by now.
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Of course, I have a different vested interest in the gay community, because I am gay, and I would certainly enjoy the tax advantages that straight people have, and the inheritance advantages, and things like Social Security, but I've always been a civil rights advocate across the board. That's how I was raised.
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That's an amazing moment, the first time you hear yourself on radio. It's still thrilling.
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I think all of us thought that by the '70s, at the latest the '80s, all the world's problems would be solved and everyone would be getting along fine. And instead we saw that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that year, Robert F. Kennedy died. We saw that it was going to be a lot more difficult than I think we had thought.
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I started 'Society's Child' on a bus in East Orange as I was going home from school. I saw a black and white couple sitting there and started thinking about it.
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I bought all my friends guitars and I had a good time with my money. But then one day the IRS came knocking.
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