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.”

“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.”

“Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.”

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

“I'm one of those regular weird people.”

“Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.”

“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.”

“You got to get it while you can.”

“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.”

“As it gets closer and more probable, being a star is really losing its meaning.”

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

“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.”

“Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.”

“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.”

“You are what you settle for. You are only as much as you settle for”

“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.”

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

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

“Rock on out.”