Who you are is what you settle for, you know?
— Janis Joplin
I've been looking around, and I noticed something: how much you really need to be loved. Ambition isn't just a desperate quest for positions or money. It's just love - lots of love.
I have to have the 'umph.' I've got to feel it, because if it's not getting through to me, the audience sure as hell aren't going to feel it either.
On stage, I make love to 25,000 different people, then I go home alone.
You know why we're stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don't let themselves feel things.
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.
I got treated very badly in Texas. They don't treat beatniks too good in Texas. Port Arthur people thought I was a beatnik, though they'd never seen one and neither had I.
Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.
Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin. Now, they are so subtle, they can milk you with two notes. They can make you feel like they told you the whole universe. But I don't know that yet. All I got now is strength. Maybe if I keep singing, maybe I'll get it.
Playing is just about feeling. Playing isn't necessarily about misery. Playing isn't necessarily about happiness. But it's just about letting yourself feel all those things that you have already on the inside of you, but you're all the time trying to push them aside because they don't make for polite conversation or something.
All of a sudden, someone threw me in front of this rock and roll band. And I decided then and there that was it. I never wanted to do anything else.
If I hold back, I'm no good. I'm no good. I'd rather be good sometimes, than holding back all the time.
I'm one of those regular weird people.
Texas is OK if you want to settle down and do your own thing quietly, but it's not for outrageous people, and I was always outrageous.
My father wouldn't get us a TV, he wouldn't allow a TV in the house.
I always wanted to be an artist, whatever that was, like other chicks want to be stewardesses. I read. I painted. I thought.
Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.
I can't talk about my singing. I'm inside it. How can you describe something you're inside of?
As it gets closer and more probable, being a star is really losing its meaning.
I'm a victim of my own insides. There was a time when I wanted to know everything. It used to make me very unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn't know what to do with it. But now I've learned to make that feeling work for me.
You got to get it while you can.
Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.
Rock on out.
I won't quit to become someone's old lady.
Guess what, I might be the first hippie pinup girl.
On stage I make love to twenty five thousand people; and then I go home alone.
When I sing, I feel like when you're first in love. It's more than sex. It's that point two people can get to they call love, when you really touch someone for the first time, but it's gigantic, multiplied by the whole audience. I feel chills.
