Linda Ronstadt Quotations

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.

Having children makes you see the world in a completely different way. When you're responsible for those little lives, you can't slough it off or forget about it until later.

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

In the United States, we spend millions of dollars on sports because it promotes teamwork, discipline, and the experience of learning to make great progress in small increments. Learning to play music does all this and more.

I don't think you can look for love. All you can do is get yourself in a situation where you don't discourage something that may be rather nice.

I listen mostly to live music, and mostly my musical experience was playing music with other people.

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.

I admire people's marriages, and I think it's a wonderful thing to have, but I don't think it's the only way to live. I think there are many ways to live and many ways to establish intimate support in your life that can be from family or friends or great roommates that you like.

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

I am a believer in discipline; it takes a lot to do well. You need discipline for those little excursions into the chaotic that make life interesting.

I always say if music can't make you cry, you're a hopeless case. I don't cry very much myself, but it's my job to make you cry.

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

I miss singing every day. I can't sing anymore. My voice doesn't work. I have Parkinson's disease, and it sometimes takes my words away from me.

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

I got to sing with Placido Domingo... I got to sing with Aaron Neville, who is one of my favorites. Got to sing with Brian Wilson, one of the great high tenors. And Ricky Skaggs, a bluegrass tenor. I'm also proud of my musical friendship with Emmylou Harris.

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

I had a galvanised voice: I could sing through a 105 fever or a flu or a root canal or anything that you could throw at me.

I wanted to sing when I was little. That's what I liked doing. It didn't occur to me that you became famous or anything like that.

People have often written about me, that I did this for this reason and that for that reason, and theyre usually 98 percent wrong.

Sometimes I was frivolous. Did you have some frivolous years? I had to live mine out in public.

You don't want people who have never had to deal with adversity - you want people who have been able to deal successfully with adversity. That's what adds to society. Those are going to be the hardest-working, best people.

I always sang harmony with my family growing up.

I love everything soft, cashmere and down. I don't like anything scratchy.

Men are very delicate. They don't like being rejected.

The smell of the carpet in a hotel room is the same everywhere.

To sing with Frank Sinatra in any capacity at all is overwhelming.

Ninety-eight percent of the singing I did was private singing - it was in the shower, at the dishwasher, driving my car, singing with the radio, whatever. I can't do any of that now. I wish I could. I don't miss performing, particularly, but I miss singing.

I grew up in Arizona. I love it. I'm a part of the desert. I feel like, really, I'm from the Sonoran Desert, which is - extends to both sides of the border. I'm really from that part of Mexico, also. And I hate that there's a fence, you know, running through it.

I didn't love Jim Morrison. There was something very reptilian about him. And I didn't care for his singing, but his band! The Doors were fantastic.

I grew up in a big sky country. Then I lived in Manhattan, where you can only see the sky between buildings, and then I went into a building where you couldn't see the sky at all. I didn't like that so much.

Singing with Aaron Neville, he pulled stuff out of my voice I never could have gotten, because if he's providing XYZ, I have to put in ABC, and usually I don't have to put in ABC.

I can't really walk well. The muscles don't get the electronic signals from my brain, not that there's anything wrong with the muscles themselves. It's just my brain.

Full disclosure here - I had a terrible crush on Smokey Robinson, like every other female on the planet.

For years, I've been interviewed, and they write what they thought I thought or what they thought I said. Sometimes it's accurate, and often it isn't.

I got a couple of different contacts from publishing companies saying they'd be interested in a book about my work: not a kiss-and-tell book, which I specifically put in the contract. Just a book about my work and what I did.

I always thought competition was for horse races and it never belonged in art. I never felt that competitive with other girl singers, really.

Parkinson's is very hard to diagnose. So when I finally went to a neurologist, and he said, 'Oh, you have Parkinson's disease,' I was completely shocked.

You have the United States, and you have Mexico, and then you have this Mexican-American thing which is this third culture, which I like to call Aztlan.

You have to erect a fence and say, ''Okay, scale this.''

We're going to cover about 80 percent of the 20th Century.

As I got older, I got Parkinson's disease, so I couldn't sing at all. That's what happened to me. I was singing at my best strength when I developed Parkinson's. I think I've had it for quite a while.

I used to live with J.D. Souther, and I would watch him write. He's be sitting, he'd say something, and then he'd write it down. That's craft.

I've been on the road since I was 17, ... and I'm 52. It's enough already.

I've been lucky in my life to work with people who I consider master singers.

The whole thing with recording is you have to know when to turn off the tape machine and just stop recording because you want to keep fixing, fixing, fixing, you know?

I've never been happy with the quality of my work. I always felt as though my musicianship was lacking and that I should have worked harder at it when I was younger. As I sang and sang, I improved.

The thing I like about singing duets is that I get things out of my voice I never get singing by myself.

I used to feel kind of impatient with people who couldn't do things fast or couldn't remember stuff.

I'm your basic atheist that believes in maybe - I'm a spiritual atheist.

I had a lot of chances to do things that other people don't ever get, and I have to be content with that. I have to look around for some other way to make myself useful.

I know my own father's business was very dependent on the goodwill and business and trade from people in northern Mexico. We knew their families and went to their weddings and baptisms and balls and picnics, and we had a great time with them.

In the Troubadour days, it was all those songwriters that I hung around with all the time, so I could get songs and find out what was going on. So we all knew each other, and we just carried each other's word around.

I'll occasionally go and do an honor like the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund because it raises money for a very worthy organization.

I didn't know why I couldn't sing - all I knew was that it was muscular or mechanical. Then, when I was diagnosed with Parkinson's, I was finally given the reason. I now understand that no one can sing with Parkinson's disease. No matter how hard you try. And in my case, I can't sing a note.

I didn't think I was a famous singer. I didn't think I was a star or that I could make the waters part - just that singing was what I was going to do.

I never thought of myself as a rock singer. I was interested in songs like 'Heart Like a Wheel,' and I liked the others for about 15 minutes.

The music that I chose during my life, it wasn't arbitrary. It was all in my family home when I was growing up. I never tried to record anything I hadn't heard before the age of 10. Otherwise, I couldn't do it authentically.

Songwriting wasn't my gift. I think you have to cultivate a gift; you have to practice and develop craft around your gift so that you can execute it in more convenient, efficient ways.

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.

You don't forget you have Parkinson's disease, believe me, especially in the shower. If you are not paying attention, you fall down.

I'd go over to my grandmother's house, and she'd be playing opera. They loved opera. Not only did they play it on the radio, but they played it on their piano. Everybody learned how to read music and how to play.

I can remember sitting at the piano. My sister was playing, and my brother was singing something, and I said, 'I want to try that.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Story is what's most important.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I've got this weird body chemistry that I don't like to get high. I'm not going to say I never tried drugs. I tried most everything. I didn't try injectables. But I didn't like it.

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

the greatest sin is carelessness.

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

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

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.

Everybody has their own level of doing their music. ... Mine just happened to resonate over the years, in one way and another, with a significant enough number of people so that I could do it professionally.

Rampant eclecticism is my middle name.

I first knew Laurie Lewis by her considerable reputation as a fiddle player and a writer of songs. When an opportunity came along to sing with her I seized it. Getting to know her as a singer and a person has been pure pleasure. Her voice is a rare combination of grit and grace, strength and delicacy. Her stories are always true.

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.

Judy Henske, who was the then reigning queen of folk music, said to me at The Troubadour, 'Honey, in this town there are four sexes. Men, women, homosexuals, and girl singers.'

I don't record (any type of genre of music) that I didn't hear in my family's living room by the time I was 10. It just is my rule that I don't break because ... I can't do it authentically ... I really think that you're just hard-wiring (synapses) in your brain up until the age of maybe 12 or 10, and there are certain things you can't learn in an authentic way after that.

I never wrote anything down. I never kept a diary, never kept a journal. I did write one letter home about touring with the Doors that I used as a reference for the book for some details there, and then I was glad I had that, but that was it.

Your musical soul is like facets of a jewel, and you stick out one facet at a time ... (and) I tend to work real hard on whatever it is I do, to get it up to speed, up to a professional level. I tend to bury myself in one thing for years at a time.

...I think it was a modest thing I did (Fahrenheit 9/11) ... this is an election year ... I'm not telling them how to vote. I'm saying get information about the issues ... at first there's just silence, then there's 'Yeah!' and then there's 'Boo' ... I have never seen a reaction like this, in all my years of touring ... Clear Channel can't threaten to not play my records because they are not going to play them anyway ...

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

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

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.

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.

the relentless touring and endless repetition of the same songs over and over again promoted a creeping awareness that my music had begun to sound like my washing machine.

What my true addiction is is reading. I love to read. If I'd get too loaded, I couldn't remember the sentence I just read.

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