Buffy Sainte-Marie Quotes

I feel sorry for people of good heart who have never had a chance to learn the realities of Native American everything - not just our history but the sweetness and the beauty and the reasons why were so close to Mother Earth.

You have to sniff out joy. Keep your nose to the joy trail.

Language and culture cannot be separated. Language is vital to understanding our unique cultural perspectives. Language is a tool that is used to explore and experience our cultures and the perspectives that are embedded in our cultures.

You have to leave room in life to dream.

Everybody's creative. We create our songs and our paintings, our families and our children. Every one of us is on the cutting edge of the future.

Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel.

Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.

By looking at the questions the kids are asking, we learn the scope of what needs to be done.

What can government do? They can listen to their own people. But I'll tell you what citizens can do, when we elect one of these people - whether we think it's a good guy or a bozo - you got to stay on the case. You don't vote and go home and give them the keys to the car, he'll drive you right off a cliff. You have to help people to stay honest.

Some people say I was very brave, but I really just didn't know any better. All I had was my originality.

Take a bunch of little kids to the beach and they all make art. Adults are too stupid to call it art, but it is art. They'll use their imaginations, make drama, make up characters, make pictures in the sand, they'll make up songs that no one's ever heard before. All kids, I think, are creative, but they get it pounded out of them in school.

As a teenager I started painting and playing guitar.

All the lights on Broadway don't amount to an acre of green.

Children don't have to be raised. They'll grow.

People sometimes ask me, because of the blacklisting, "Do you hate the government? Don't you hate white people?" No, it's greed that's the problem.

Grab a guitar, put some kind of strings on it, a banjo string, then a violin string, then a guitar string, tune it any way you want, and make some noise, and see what you get. And work on it until you get something that you think is interesting. That's all there is to art for me.

I had no reason to want to copy anybody else. What I wanted to give audiences for the few minutes that I thought my career would last was something unique.

There is an exercise I teach at colleges: Get yourself a canvas and a bunch of acrylics and go into a very dimly lighted room. Dip a brush into one of the colors, slap it on the canvas, don't look, close your eyes, make a painting, don't look, turn the lights on and see what you've got. I think this releases people from the editor in their life that's always standing over their shoulder saying, "Oh, you don't have any talent; who do you think you are?"

Some of my songs are like dreams, and when you go to sleep at night you don't know if you're gonna have a dream or what you're gonna dream about.

There is so much joy in native culture but so much poverty. It's very disturbing.

I didn't know what I was gonna get the first time I sat down at a piano, but I loved it and it became my playmate for life.

The key is in remaining just aloof enough from a painting so that you know when to stop.

Every time somebody makes an Indian movie...Cher on a horse with a headdress and a miniskirt...the fashion industry cashes in.

All kids, I think, are creative, but they get it pounded out of them in school.

I'm trying to entice people, and sometimes my information is very hard hitting. So I've always wanted to have a soft approach.