Quotes from Janis Joplin

You got to get it while you can.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Don't go looking for Mr. Right. Look for Mr. Right Now.

I love being a star more than life itself.

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.

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

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.

I've been looking around, and I noticed something: how much you really need to be loved. Ambition isn't just a desperate quest for positions or money. It's just love - lots of love.

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

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

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

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.

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

Now that I'm here, where am I?

If you've got a today, don't wear it tomorrow. Tomorrow never happens. It's all the same day.

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.

All any girl really wants is just love and a man. But what man can put up with a rock-n-roll star?

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

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