Top 45 John Mellencamp Quotes

Words matter. These are the best John Mellencamp Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I'm wide open and will entertain anything anybody has t

I’m wide open and will entertain anything anybody has to say, but if it’s MTV and radio, well, they’re great things, but can’t be the only thing. I don’t know that it would work even for the Beatles.
John Mellencamp
I went to New York in 1974, to either try to get a record deal, get into the New York Art Student League, or be a dancer. So that was my plan. Some plan. And I had no money.
John Mellencamp
Sound quality was supposed to be one of the big selling points for CDs but, as we know, it wasn’t very good at all. It was just another con, a get-rich-quick scheme, a monumental hoax perpetrated on the music consuming public.
John Mellencamp
When politicians use fear, they are playing into the enemy’s hand.
John Mellencamp
Bob Dylan’s first couple of records in the 60’s weren’t considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album.
John Mellencamp
A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.
John Mellencamp
This cycle of make a record, tour has been going on for 20 years now. I don’t even know why I do it sometimes. Do I need more money? Do I need more platinum and gold records? The only thing I can think of is ego.
John Mellencamp
I was one of those guys, you know, playing and singing, and there was no reason for me to write a song, because there were so many beautiful songs out. And Bob Dylan was always the ultimate songwriter, and nobody could ever write a song as good as him, and nobody ever has written a song as good as him.
John Mellencamp
What’s the difference? One guy’s the same as the other.
John Mellencamp
Radio was my friend after ‘Jack & Diane’ and ‘Hurts So Good.’
John Mellencamp
I’m your average Joe guy. I don’t really care for politicians.
John Mellencamp
Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don’t care whose fault it is, it’s the truth.
John Mellencamp
What is there to be afraid of? The worst thing that can happen is you fail. So what? I failed at a lot of things. My first record was horrible.
John Mellencamp
I’m as left-wing as you can get.
John Mellencamp
The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased.
John Mellencamp
As I’ve matured as a songwriter, I realize that if it’s out there, it’s mine.
John Mellencamp
‘Crumbling’ Down’ is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president – he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.
John Mellencamp
This is about black people selling out other black people.
John Mellencamp
I’ve just been fortunate to havehad a lot of hit records, though Human Wheels doesn’t qualify as a hit record-but it’s really the best single I’ve ever had.
John Mellencamp
My task with ‘Uh-Huh’ was to make a more even record and get away from juvenile topics like ‘Hurts So Good.’ But I also knew if I wanted to continue, I had to have more hits.
John Mellencamp
A lot of the time, I write in the third person, but I’m mostly describing my own ordeals. When those unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get free, you must defeat your ghosts.
John Mellencamp
It’s my responsibility as a singer-songwriter to report the news.
John Mellencamp
I think it’s ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don’t buy my records. And there ain’t that many teenagers out there in the marketplace.
John Mellencamp
Take ‘Jack and Diane.’ I was so disgusted with people thinking the line ‘Hold on to sixteen as long as you can’ meant to stay a teenager forever. What I meant was keep doing whatever makes you feel alive.
John Mellencamp
If I laugh a couple of times a day, I’m doing good. People think it’s their God-given right to be happy, and it’s just not. It’s something you’ve got to work at. I like to paint the human condition, and the human condition is not smiles and happy people.
John Mellencamp
I think Roosevelt had four terms, didn’t he? I think we should go back to that, and we should go back to four years for a senator, four years for a congressman, and I think we’d see a huge change in our society.
John Mellencamp
I’ve seen beautiful art on the sides of buildings. I’ve seen beautiful art in museums. I’ve seen beautiful art in galleries. Beautiful art is everywhere.
John Mellencamp
We could walk 3 minutes and be on the beach. I think the music kind of suffered because of it. It kind of smelled like Jimmy Buffett, which is a bad thing.
John Mellencamp
If you hide information from people, don’t want people to see the Ten Commandments or don’t want people to hear about Darwin, aren’t we hiding things that we know from our future generations? I just think that that’s incorrect.
John Mellencamp
I’m using my art to comment on what I see. You don’t have to agree with it.
John Mellencamp
My best songs come from a place outside myself.
John Mellencamp
If we have any hope for survival of the music that we a

If we have any hope for survival of the music that we all love, compassion must replace name-calling, fairness must replace greed, and we need to come together as a musical community and try to understand each other’s problems.
John Mellencamp
I need a long and lingering death to make sure that I have time to have a deathbed conversion.
John Mellencamp
I don’t want to be a politician. I don’t like politics. It’s petty; it fights dirty.
John Mellencamp
Hanging out is a waste of time. The only time I would hang out was when I was a kid, I would hang out in the streets. But once I started making records, I stopped hanging out.
John Mellencamp
When people are afraid, they make emotional decisions.
John Mellencamp
I’m the guy who wrote The Authority Song. Did they think I was kidding? Did they think it was only a song to entertain?
John Mellencamp
I wanted to study at the Art Students League in New York when I was young, but I didn’t have the money. Then I was fortunate enough to become Johnny Cougar Mellencamp. At the time, I thought I’d make a couple of records and get back to painting. It never dawned on me that I’d be 64 years old and still making music.
John Mellencamp
One quality of a good songwriter is to be vague. A vague notion, a vague image, but enough to give the listener the opportunity to make more out of what’s being said than is there. That’s the great thing about Bob Dylan’s songs: We the listeners have made more out of them than he ever intended.
John Mellencamp
Wait a minute, guys, I have always been on your side. I have always spoken for you, always tried to put on a good face for the state of Indiana. All of a sudden, some of you people think I’m a bad guy?
John Mellencamp
I want my paintings to look like they were found in a garage. If they get a scratch or a hole in them, it just becomes part of the painting.
John Mellencamp
People have the right to say what they want to.
John Mellencamp
All I’m doing is painting. It’s my hobby. And that’s that.
John Mellencamp
As I get older, I have a different look on life. I just try to be a little more tolerant and a little bit more centered about what’s going on around me and not so emotional.
John Mellencamp
Life should never be viewed from the vantage point of achievements. It is total folly.
John Mellencamp