My goal as a writer is more to comfort than to disturb.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a writer's intention to provide solace through their work rather than provoke discomfort.
Joni Mitchell emphasizes her aspiration as a writer to create comforting and soothing narratives. She believes that the primary role of a writer should be to offer peace and solace to the audience, suggesting that art can serve as a refuge in turbulent times rather than merely a source of provocation or disturbance.
In practice
In a speech about the role of artists in society.
There's a man who's been out sailing In a decade full of dreams And he takes her to a schooner And he treats her like a queen Bearing beads from California With their amber stones and green He has called her from the harbor He has kissed her with his freedom He has heard her off to starboard In the breaking and the breathing Of the water weeds While she was busy being free
Unlike some of my peers, I haven't really hit a writer's block. When I hit a block I just paint, which is an old crop rotation trick.
This is a nation that has lost the ability to be self-critical, and that makes a lie out of the freedoms.
You wake up one day and suddenly realize that your youth is behind you, even though you're still young at heart.
I have an aversion to being mislabeled. Here's a label I'd accept: I'm an 'individual.' I'm someone who can't follow, and doesn't want to lead.
What I do is unusual: chordal movements that have never been used before, changing keys and modalities mid-song.
Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.
It's much more important to write than to be written about.
Where would fashion be without literature?
It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.
Not till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination"-above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." shall we have it.
Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
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