Janis Joplin

Janis: 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: 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: Well, I was supposed to be on the latest cover of Newsweek, but Eisenhower died. Goddamnit, 14 heart attacks and he had to die in my week.

Janis: The biggest thing in our house was when you learnt to write your name, you got to go and get a library card.

Janis: Texas is okay 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: Onstage I make love to 25,000 people, then I go home alone.

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

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

Janis: My father was like a secret intellectual, a bookreader, a talker, and a thinker. He was very important to me, because he made me think.

Janis: It's a supreme emotional and physical experience-I live for that one hour on stage. It's full of feeling-it's a rush, honey.

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

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

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

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

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