Janis Ian Quotes

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.

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.

There will always be those people who are just backward and ignorant. There will always be those people. They need somebody to feel superior to.

Libraries are a hallmark of a civilized culture, and librarians represent that culture to all facets of society.

I love seeing teachers outside of school. It's like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs.

Some people would rather stay ignorant and self-satisfied.

Truth is not the enemy and whatever does not kill us, sets us free.

It's neat to have finally reached a point where I can accept what I was and what I am.

At the end of the day, if you don't have a record contract, a studio or a guitar, you can still write songs. You're still an artist. That's something no one can take away.

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.

I feel I was born with the music coming to me, and that's not something to be wasted.

Those of us with ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces, desperately remained at home, inventing lovers on the phone.

Once you're halfway home, you know that you can probably get the rest of the way there.

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.

I bought all my friends guitars and I had a good time with my money. But then one day the IRS came knocking.

It's what I do well - I write about things that make people uncomfortable. That's probably the only thing I do better than my peers.

It seems to be part of the human condition to need someone you can look down on. I still don't get that one.

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.

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.

My parents both were doing the Civil Rights Movement, were very involved with the civil rights to Congress. And my friends' parents were as well.

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.

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.

I think these last 10 years have seen just a huge shift in the psyche of this country as regards gay people. I think AIDS had a lot to do with it. So many families who really believed they'd 'never met one' were suddenly confronted with their sons becoming ill, and friends of sons. I think that brought a lot of it into the open.

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.

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.