Janis Joplin

I gotta go on doin' it the way I see it...I got no choice but to take it like I see it. I'm here to have a party while I'm on this earth...I'm gettin' it now, today. I don't even know where I'm gonna be twenty years from now, so I'm just gonna keep on rockin', cause if I start saving up bits and pieces of me...man, there ain't gonna be nothing left for Janis.

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.

Like most girls I'm always really self-conscious about do I look fat, if my legs are short, if I'm weird shaped, but when I go on stage, man, it never occurs to me. I think I look beautiful.

I won't quit to become someone's old lady.

Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

You can feel all things at once, so why not wear all things at once?

Wait a minute, maybe I can do anything.

If you can get them once, man, get them standing up when they should be sitting down, sweaty when they should be decorous, smile when they should be applauding politely-and I think you sort of switch on their brain, man, so that makes them say: 'Wait a minute, maybe I can do anything.' Whoooooo! It's life. That's what rock and roll is for, turn that switch on, and man, it can all be.

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.

Guess what, I might be the first hippie pinup girl.

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.

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.

I talk to the audience, look into their eyes. I need them and they need me.

Hippies believe the world could be a better place. Beatniks believe things aren’t going to get better and say the hell with it, stay stoned and have a good time.

I'd rather not sing than sing quiet.

Why should I hold back now and sound mediocre, just so I can sound mediocre twenty years from now?

When everything is together - the band, me, the audience, it's boss! It's just like magic.

What we've had to do is learn to control success, put it in perspective, and not lose the essence of what we're doing - the music.

I started out to be a person on the street, just like everybody else. I didn't start out to be a singer. But I got sort of swept up in this singing thing, and after I got involved in it it got really important to me if I was good or not.

I can't talk about my singing; I'm inside it. How can you describe something you're inside of?

I want a bigger band with higher highs, a bigger ladder. And I want more bottom - I want an incredible amount of bottom. I want more noise. When I do a rock tune I want it to be so HUGE.