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.
I'm not about either entertaining or instructing. The entertaining and instructing are secondary fallout from the fundamental thing, which is basically to create an aesthetic object.
The essence of cinema is editing.
The more the technocrats programme it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs: the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bow-legged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
I want to do what I can lend my talents to, but I want it to be as a human being and not as a two-dimensional character.
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