Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.
Janis Joplin

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.
Janis Joplin

Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.
Janis Joplin

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

I always wanted to be an artist, whatever that was, like other chicks want to be stewardesses. I read. I painted. I thought.
Janis Joplin

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.
Janis Joplin

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

I'm one of those regular weird people.
Janis Joplin

If I hold back, I'm no good. I'm no good. I'd rather be good sometimes, than holding back all the time.
Janis Joplin

My father wouldn't get us a TV, he wouldn't allow a TV in the house.
Janis Joplin


Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.
Janis Joplin

On stage I make love to twenty five thousand people; and then I go home alone.
Janis Joplin

On stage, I make love to 25,000 different people, then I go home alone.
Janis Joplin

Rock on out.
Janis Joplin

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.
Janis Joplin

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.
Janis Joplin

You got to get it while you can.
Janis Joplin

You know why we're stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don't let themselves feel things.
Janis Joplin