10 Janis Joplin Quotes
“I was the same chick, because I’ve been her forever, and I know her, and she ain’t no star: she’s lonely, or she’s good at something. I have to get undressed after the show, my clothes are ruined, my heels are run through, my underwear is ripped, my body’s strained from my clothes, my hair’s stringy, I got a headache and I got to go home, and I’m lonely, and my clothes are all fucked up, my shoes have come apart, and I’m pleading with my road manager to please give me a ride home, please, please, just so I can take these fuckin’ clothes off, and that ain’t no star, man, that’s just a person.”
Janis Joplin Quotes
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 Quotes
“There isn’t going to be any turning point. … There isn’t going to be any next-month-it’ll-be-better, next fucking year, next fucking life. You don’t have any time to wait for. You just got to look around you and say, “So this is it. This is really all there is to it. This little thing.” Everybody needing such little things and they can’t get them. Everybody needing just a little … confidence from somebody else and they can’t get it. Everybody, everybody fighting to protect their little feelings. Everybody, you know, like reaching out tentatively but drawing back. It’s so shallow and seems so … fucking … it seems like such a shame. It’s so close to being like really right and good and open and amorphous and giving and everything. But it’s not. And it ain’t gonna be.
September 1969
quoted in “The New Yorker” 9 August 1999”
― Janis Joplin Quotes
“Honey, to them I’m just a chick who is hung over at 11:00 in the morning. My hair isn’t combed, I’m wearin’ funny lookin’ clothes, plus I’m wearin’ feathers. I walk in here and say I want a drink. These people don’t want to see me, baby. I mean, let’s face it, they don’t want me in here – period. So there’s three old cats sayin’, ‘What is this chick doin’ here and why?’ They’d just as soon be talkin’ about the Mets game and they don’t want this chick walkin’ in with bells on and a big sack of beads. There’s the snide remarks I’m not supposed to hear, but loud enough, of course, for me to hear. Everybody gets it, man. Getting’ treated like a hippie, that’s what I’m talkin’ about.”
Janis Joplin Quotes
“I don’t understand how come you’re gone, man. I don’t understand why half the world is still crying, man, when the other half of the world is still crying too, man, and it can’t get it together. I mean, if you got a cat for one day, man – I mean, if you, say, say, maybe you want a cat for 365 days, right – You ain’t got him for 365 days, you got him for one day, man. Well I tell you that one day, man, better be your life. Because, you know, you can say, oh man, you can cry about the other 364, man, but you’re gonna lose that one day, man, and that’s all you’ve got. You gotta call that love, man. That’s what it is, man. If you got it today you don’t want it tomorrow, man, ’cause you don’t need it, ’cause as a matter of fact, as we discovered on the train, tomorrow never happens, man. It’s all the same fucking day, man.”
Janis Joplin Quotes
“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 Quotes
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.
Janis Joplin Quotes
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 Quotes
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.
Janis Joplin Quotes
I’m a caterpillar crawling for your love. I’m a butterfly flying for your love. Well, I’ll be anything that you want me to be. Baby, I’d even would be climbing up your tree.
Janis Joplin Quotes