Janis Joplin Song Quotes

I'm just doing what I wanted to and what feels right and not settling for bullshit and it worked. How can they be mad at that? ~ Janis Joplin

To her audience, Janis Joplin has remained a symbol, artifact and reminder of late Sixties youth culture. Her popularity never derived from her musical ability, but from her capacity to link her fantasies of freedom and immortality with ours. ~ Jon Landau

As good as you've been to this world is as good as it's gonna be right back to you. ~ Janis Joplin

The intensity with which Janis Joplin sings, you simply can't find a singer like that. It's almost scary the amount of emotion and energy and passion she puts into her performance. ~ Michael Wadleigh

Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon. ~ Joan Didion

The 1960s:
A lot of people remember hating President Lyndon Baines Johnson and loving Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, depending on the point of view. God rest their souls. ~ Richard Brautigan

The strange thing about Janice Joplin is that she could look incredibly vulnerable on stage. That is, until she had a mike in her hand and started to sing. Once she started singing she put her whole life into each and every song. It was a remarkable transformation.
Each song was her life! ~ Karl Wiggins

Little Girl Blue"

Sit there, hmm, count your fingers.
What else, what else is there to do ?
Oh and I know how you feel,
I know you feel that you're through.
Oh wah wah ah sit there, hmm, count,
Ah, count your little fingers,
My unhappy oh little girl, little girl blue, yeah.

Oh sit there, oh count those raindrops
Oh, feel 'em falling down, oh honey all around you.
Honey don't you know it's time,
I feel it's time,
Somebody told you 'cause you got to know
That all you ever gonna have to count on
Or gonna wanna lean on
It's gonna feel just like those raindrops do
When they're falling down, honey, all around you.
Oh, I know you're unhappy.

Oh sit there, ah go on, go on
And count your fingers.
I don't know what else, what else
Honey have you got to do.
And I know how you feel,
And I know you ain't got no reason to go on
And I know you feel that you must be through.
Oh honey, go on and sit right back down,
I want you to count, oh count your fingers,
Ah my unhappy, my unlucky
And my little, oh, girl blue.
I know you're unhappy,
Ooh ah, honey I know,
Baby I know just how you feel. ~ Janis Joplin

They asked me, How did you learn to sing the blues like that? How did you learn to sing that heavy? I just opened my mouth and that's what I sounded like. You can't make up something that you don't feel. I didn't make it up. I just opened my mouth and it existed. ~ Janis Joplin

When you hold somebody, you gotta hold them like it's the last minute of your life. ~ Janis Joplin

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

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

The more you live, the less you die. ~ Janis Joplin

It's hard to be free but when it works, it's worth it! ~ Janis Joplin

I don't think I sound like Janis Joplin. I'm a woman with a raspy voice. ~ Brittany Howard

When I moved to L. A. with this little wimpy garage band, the first people we met were the Doors. Then we met Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin. All of the people who died of excess were our big brothers and sisters. So I said to myself: How do you become a legend and enjoy it? The answer is to create a character as legendary as those guys and leave that character on the stage. ~ Alice Cooper

Tomorrow never happens. It's all the same fucking day, man. ~ Janis Joplin

You are what you settle for. ~ Janis Joplin

You're never going to see the fat Elvis in me. People I admired like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and John Belushi all died at 27. I've got jeans older than that. ~ Jon Bon Jovi

You can destroy your now by worrying about tomorrow. ~ Janis Joplin

In general, though, women aren't really allowed to be kick-ass. It's like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. Culturally we don't allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy. Female singers who push too much, and too hard, don't tend to last very long. They're jags, bolts, comets: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday. But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That's why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. The term girl power was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. Girl power: a phrase that would later be co-opted by the Spice Girls, a group put together by men, each Spice Girl branded with a different personality, polished and stylized to be made marketable as a faux female type. Coco was one of the few girls on the playground who had never heard of them, and that's its own form of girl power, saying no to female marketing! ~ Kim Gordon

To be true to myself, to be the person that was on the inside of me, and not play games. That's what I'm trying to do mostly in the whole world, is not bullshit myself and not bullshit anybody else. ~ Janis Joplin

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

Wait a minute, maybe I can do anything. ~ Janis Joplin

I thought it was going to be a hut in Topanga and Janis Joplin was going to come out, but it's a real doctor ... I went to Beverly Hills to meet this midwife; you'd think they'd be in nature. ~ Simon Helberg

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 had a lot of hurts and confusions. You know, it's hard when you're a kid to be different. You're all full of things, and you don't know that it's about. ~ Janis Joplin

Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer. ~ Janis Joplin

To be honest, I've made a game out of trying to live through my James Dean, Janis Joplin, Freddie Prinze, Jim Morrison period, those demons that we all have that we're either successful or not at making work for us rather than destroy us. ~ Patrick Swayze

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

In my insides, it really hurts if someone doesn't like me. It's silly. ~ Janis Joplin

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

Betty Dravis is a fantastic mix of Shirley Jackson, Edna Buchanan and Janis Joplin. Don't ask me how I came up with that unlikely comparison––I just feel it, and I haven't been drinking much tonight. ~ Mark Laflamme

I don't know what happened. I just exploded. I'd never sung like that before. I used to stand still and sing simple, but you can't sing like that in front of a rock band. You have to sing loud and move wild with all that in back of you. Now, I don't know how to perform any other way. ~ Janis Joplin

History has a way of coming back to you. In the case of Janis Joplin appearing at the festival in 1968, her performance affected the life of a Bostonian who is now a member of the Newport Festivals Foundation Board of Directors. Ward Mooney was so affected and emotionally involved in Janis' performance at Newport, that when he heard the festival was going nonprofit, he knew wanted to become a part. Janis was beautiful, gracious and respectful, and the power of her Newport performance continues to live on. ~ George Wein

The older the grapes, sweeter the wine. ~ Janis Joplin

After they see me, when their mothers are feeding them all that cashmere sweater and girdle
[expletive deleted by the New York Times], maybe they'll have a second thought - that they can be themselves and win. ~ Janis Joplin

She knew for a fact that being left-handed automatically made you special.
Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, and Albert Schweitzer were all left-handed. Of course, no believable scientific theory could rest on such a small group of people. When Lindsay probed further, however, more proof emerged. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, M.C. Escher, Mark Twain, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carrol, H.G. Wells, Eudora Welty, and Jessamyn West- all lefties. The lack of women in her research had initially bothered her until she mentioned it to Allegra. "Chalk that up to male chauvinism," she said. "Lots of left-handed women were geniuses. Janis Joplin was. All it means is that the macho-man researchers didn't bother asking. ~ Jo-Ann Mapson

My business is to enjoy and have fun. And why not, if in the end everything will end, right? ~ Janis Joplin

Coyote: A small canid (Canis latrans) native to western North America that is closely related to the American wolf and whose cry has often been compared to that of Sippie Wallace and Janis Joplin, amongst others. ~ Sherman Alexie

You can't stay in your home town and play because the two people will get tired of seeing you. ~ Janis Joplin

I know about Woodstock probably as much as your average person who is over 30, where I'd know Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead. ~ Demetri Martin