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.
Interpretation
Authenticity and passion in performance resonate with the audience.
Janis Joplin emphasizes the importance of having genuine emotion and energy in any performance or communication. If the performer does not feel passionate about what they are sharing, the audience will likely not connect with it either, making the experience less impactful.
In practice
A motivational speaker might use this quote to highlight the necessity of authenticity in their speeches.
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?
The basis of persistence is the Power of Will.
Sky is the limit and you know that you keep on,_x000D_ _x000D_ Just keep on pressin on._x000D_ _x000D_ Sky is the limit and you know that you can have_x000D_ _x000D_ what you want, be what you want.
Obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.
I'm a little bit of an eternal optimist. People always say to me, 'If you go do this and it fails, what are you going to do?' I don't care. I'm going to give it my best shot. That's what I'm going to do. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And I'll try again.
The things a man has to have are hope and confidence in himself against odds, and sometimes he needs somebody, his pal or his mother or his wife or God, to give him that confidence.
I'd look at one of my stonecutters hammering away at the rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet, at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I knew it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
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