Linda Ronstadt Quotes

The essential elements of singing are voice, musicianship, and story. It is the rare artist that has all three in abundance.

The dream world of sleep and the dream world of music are not far apart. I often catch glimpses of one as I pass through a door to the other, like encountering a neighbor in the hallway going into the apartment next to one’s own. In the recording studio, I would often lie down to nap and wake up with harmony parts fully formed in my mind, ready to be recorded. I think of music as dreaming in sound.

The thing you have to be prepared for is that other people don't always dream your dream.

Someone once asked me why people sing. I answered that they sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day. Perhaps more than the birds do, humans hold a grudge. They sing to complain of how grievously they have been wronged, and how to avoid it in the future. They sing to help themselves execute a job of work. They sing so the subsequent generations won’t forget what the current generation endured, or dreamed, or delighted in.

The only reason to be with somebody is that they make you a better person and you make them a better person.

I feel sorry for a culture that depends too much on delegating its musical expression to professionals. It is fine to have heroes, but we should do our own singing first, even if it is never heard beyond the shower curtain.

Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight, someone's thinking of me and loving me tonight.

Everywhere you go, there's a soundtrack. You can't really quite hear it. It's just a little out of the range of hearing.

When the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby, it helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky.

Even though I know how very far apart we are, it helps to think we might be wishing underneath the same bright star.

Ninety-nine percent of singing is listening and hearing, and so then 1 percent of it is singing.

People don't realize that by voting Republican, they voted against themselves....I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don't know anything about the Iraqis, but they're angry and frustrated in their own lives. It's like Germany, before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we've got a new bunch of Hitlers.

I think musicians are always supportive of each other because they want the groove to keep going on. They just basically want to play music.

I grew up singing Mexican music, and that's based on indigenous Mexican rhythms. Mexican music also has an overlay of West African music, based on huapango drums, and it's kind of like a 6/8 time signature, but it really is a very syncopated 6/8. And that's how I attack vocals.

This is an election year, and I think we're in desperate trouble and it's time for people to speak up and not pipe down. It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know.

I think there's mind in nature. There's a power in nature, and there's a universal power that you'd better not ignore.

I can't sing half as well as Claudia Lennear. Hats off to her, but somehow, things happened for me.

Art is for healing ourselves, and everybody needs their own personal art to heal up their problems.

The greatest sin is carelessness.

Music should be an elective experience. You should go, "I'm going to sit down and listen to some Beethoven, by God," and then you get to hear it.

I never thought I'd write, because I'd never written anything in my whole life.

We were raised with the idea that we had limitless chances and we got very shocked to learn that wasn't the case.

I love sex as much as I love music, and I think it's as hard to do.

I dont think you can look for love. All you can do is get yourself in a situation where you dont discourage something that may be rather nice.

There should not be a question of legal or illegal immigration. People came and immigrated to this country from the time of the Indians. No ones illegal. They should just be able to come.

The constant fear of a performer is to become what is reflected back at you.

In committing to artistic growth, you have to refine your skills to support your instincts.

Life's full of loss, who knows the cost, living in the memory of the love that never was.

Don't know much, but I know I love you.

Being a celebrity made me so uncomfortable that I would have preferred standing behind the amplifiers.

I can't draw. But I can draw with sound. That's the most useful thing I learned in terms of what my craft is... The arrangements were mine. They were little lines and stuff that I had written myself... And I was locked into this idea that vocals didn't count, melodies didn't count, songwriting craftsmanship didn't count. The only thing that counted was high arching guitar solos...

Marijuana has a lot of very good medical uses, and I truly believe it should be legal, but for just recreational use it wasn't my drug. I didn't like it.

Rampant eclecticism is my middle name.

I'm a chameleon. I can change my voice a lot. I always was able to, because in my family's music I was a harmony singer, and harmony singing is really hard.

I wish I had as much in bed as I get in the newspapers.

Being an entertainer, especially in times like these, is really a public service.

There are a lot of aspiring singers who are not paid attention to because they don't look like a fashion model.

I never went to the Beatles' concerts to scream. I never screamed at anybody's show. I was on my feet with the entire, all of the crowned heads of Motown, and we were shrieking our guts out.

You and I, travel to the beat of a different drum, can't you tell by the way I run, every time you make eyes at me.

I think the zenith of popular songwriting to the United States of America was that period that started in the '20s and went into the '50s. It was the period of the great American standard song.

American radio from the '30s through the '60s was just fabulous. There was such a diversity.

My feeling is that the beaches should belong to everybody. Nobody should be able to build anything. It causes erosion. It's a bad thing altogether.

If you don't have story to tell the public at large - you have to be able to sort of go listen.

Mainly, when I ran into Emmylou Harris, that was it, you know? We could finish each other's sentences musically, and personally, too. We have a very shared, similar sensibility. And that was a friendship that really opened up a tremendous number of musical doors for me.

Music isn't just for professionals. We delegate all of our music and our dancing and our art to professionals. It's silly. We should be doing our own dancing and drawing.

My feeling about school was that it interfered with my reading.

I think there's just a lot of compassion in art. Again, when you're doing something that resonates with somebody else, you're going through an experience another person has had, whether it's been a painful experience or a joyous experience or a happy experience.

I was never bored because I always had a book. So I had a doorway into another world or another universe. It was great.

Music is a work in progress. On a record, it gets frozen in time. And it's oddly unnatural.

When I would be on the stage singing, I would see a movie of something that happened, I would be telling the story. I would be describing the story in sound, but my goal would be to make somebody else run their own movie.