Top 100 Joplin's Quotes
#1. When I got hoarse, the manager would say, 'Drink this. Joplin used to drink this,' and I used to say, 'Joplin? Joplin's dead.
Cyndi Lauper
#2. HENRY JOPLIN'S PRECEPT
Don't be friends with jerks.
R.J. Palacio
#3. We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.
Alice Walker
#4. My end goal in the piano is to play Scott Joplin's 'Maple Leaf Rag.'
Miranda Leek
#5. I think that Stevie Nicks is one of the greats. Steve Nicks and Grace Slick and Janis Joplin have the real rock voices, to me.
Patti LuPone
#6. 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 Joplin
#7. 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
#8. I didn't want to look like anyone else - like Janis Joplin or Grace Slick. That's why I never went to any of the big designers.
Stevie Nicks
#9. You know you've got it, if it makes you feel good.
Janis Joplin
#10. Let me see you do the 'rag time dance' ...
Turn left and do the 'Cake walk prance' ...
Turn the other way and do the 'Slow drag' ...
Now take your lady to the world's fair ( ... )
And do the 'rag time dance.'
Scott Joplin
#11. People hear a powerful female singer in a rock and roll band, and they say, 'Janis Joplin.' I think people just make that comparison because it's easy. But I don't think I sound like her at all.
Brittany Howard
#12. Purity of action guided Janis's behavior. If she was going to be good, she was very, very good. If she was going to be bad, she let all the stops out. Anything less than full commitment to an idea of activity was 'hypocritical', the worst adjective anyone could hurl at another.
Laura Joplin
#13. Singing, it's like it's like loving somebody, it's a supreme emotional and physical experience.
Janis Joplin
#14. 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
#15. You can't stay in your home town and play because the two people will get tired of seeing you.
Janis Joplin
#17. The music began, and it was one of those life-changing moments. I saw an artist, Janis Joplin. She was exhilarating. She was vibrating. And she was like no other artist that I had ever seen before ... It struck me that hard. Maybe the word is epiphany, when you get that special sensation.
Clive Davis
#18. When you hold somebody, you gotta hold them like it's the last minute of your life.
Janis Joplin
#19. The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist. It's a different world without Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Curtis Mayfield, Brian Jones and the rest.
Steven Van Zandt
#20. The citizens of Joplin were unwittingly being trained not to act when the sirens sounded.
Mike Smith
#22. Shortly before she died Janis Joplin gave me the Gibson Hummingbird she recorded "Me and Bobbby McGee" on ... Janis was a good guitar player, for her purposes .. she just wanted to play along with her songs, and she had a real pure and nice style for that ...
Sam Andrew
#23. I believe the only people who truly experience and test the application of equality are twins.
Janis Joplin
#24. Janis Joplin sings the blues as hard as any black person.
B.B. King
#25. Honey, if you've had your eye on a piece of talent and that chick down the road has been getting all the action, then you know what you gotta do ... Try A Little Bit Harder.
Janis Joplin
#26. When everything is together - the band, me, the audience, it's boss! It's just like magic.
Janis Joplin
#27. The late, great Janis Joplin could drink ten men under the table, then sing loud enough to shake the teeth out of their head.
Shawn Amos
#28. Tomorrow never happens. It's all the same fucking day, man.
Janis Joplin
#29. I love that Euro-pop dance music, but with girl power. I also listen to Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. I have a Beatles song tattooed on my foot. I'm all over the place.
Hilary Duff
#30. You better not compromise yourself, it's all you've got.
Janis Joplin
#31. She's the kind of person who either dies tragically at twenty-seven, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, or else grows up to win, like, the first-ever Nobel Prize for Awesome.
John Green
#32. I just want to feel as much as I can, it's what soul is all about.
Janis Joplin
#33. In 1974, when I started working with the material that became 'Horses,' a lot of our great voices had died. We'd lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
Patti Smith
#34. 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 Joplin
#35. She's cute. In a weird, Janis Joplin, will probably die at twenty-seven kind of way.
Krystal Sutherland
#36. I'm not really thinking much ... Just sort of, trying to feel.
Janis Joplin
#37. Strange it's such a quiet peaceful existence and I'm enjoying it so thoroughly.
Laura Joplin
#38. What we've had to do is learn to control success, put it in perspective, and not lose the essence of what we're doing - the music.
Janis Joplin
#39. 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
#40. I'm part of an industry that everybody wants to be a part of. I do hang out with a lot of sort of powerful, interesting people like Bella Freud or Jay Joplin or Tracey Emin. I'm part of that group of people. Brit artists who are doing things. That's what I do. Some of them happen to be aristocrats.
Duncan Roy
#41. Guess what, I might be the first hippie pinup girl.
Janis Joplin
#42. 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
#43. Because it has such a ragged movement. It suggests something like that.
Scott Joplin
#44. You're only as much as you settle for. If they settle for being somebody's dishwasher that's their own f***ing problem. If you don't settle for that and you keep fighting it, you know, you'll end up anything you want to be.
Janis Joplin
#45. Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?
Janis Joplin
#47. I love being a star more than life itself.
Janis Joplin
#48. When I'm dead twenty-five years, people are going to begin to recognize me.
Scott Joplin
#49. I won't quit to become someone's old lady.
Janis Joplin
#50. At least we know we tend to be afraid. If you object to my plural noun, I'll retract it.
Janis Joplin
#51. 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
#52. To this day, there's nobody, nobody that sounds like Janice Joplin.
Clive Davis
#53. If someone comes along, gonna give you some love and affection, I say get it while you can.
Janis Joplin
#54. America? They had a good girl singer, Janis Joplin.
Maurice Gibb
#55. 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
#56. I want a bigger band with higher highs, a bigger ladder. And I want more bottom - I want an incredible amount of bottom. I want more noise. When I do a rock tune I want it to be so HUGE ...
Janis Joplin
#57. 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
#58. 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.
Janis Joplin
#59. Watching artists like Joplin perform, I felt that tingle down my spine; I experienced the wonders of a cultural and musical revolution.
Clive Davis
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. I say I'm Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin all wrapped up into one. If I die early ... I'll be just like those guys.
Dennis Rodman
#63. I remember the first time somebody played me Janis Joplin. My friend Donna put on Janis Joplin, and she said, 'You're like her.' At the time, I wasn't even a singer; I was a drummer. I just wanted to play the drums.
Sophie B. Hawkins
#64. You are what you settle for. You are only as much as you settle for
Janis Joplin
#65. On stage, I make love to 25,000 different people, then I go home alone.
Janis Joplin
#66. This whole thing that's happened to me, you see, this whole success thing..it hasn't yet really compromised the position that I took a long time ago in Texas, that was to be true to myself, to be the person that I ... that was on inside of me and not play games ...
Janis Joplin
#67. If I hold back, I'm no good. I'm no good. I'd rather be good sometimes, than holding back all the time.
Janis Joplin
#68. I think no-one was surprised to hear that Janis Joplin was dead. She seemed to be living up all of her energy that she had to give in just a few years. Now you listen to covers of her songs by various women, and it's pale in comparison.
Michael Wadleigh
#69. 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
#70. My business is to enjoy and have fun. And why not, if in the end everything will end, right?
Janis Joplin
#71. Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.
Janis Joplin
#72. Maybe my audiences can enjoy my music more if they think I'm destroying myself.
Janis Joplin
#73. On stage I make love to twenty five thousand people; and then I go home alone.
Janis Joplin
#74. Nikki Lamborn has the best female rock voice since Janis Joplin and I know what I'm talking about, I knew Janis.
Roger Daltrey
#75. I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,
that Joplin had the last drunken throat,
that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.
Patti Smith
#76. 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
#77. It's not what isn't, it's what you wish was that makes unhappiness.
Janis Joplin
#78. Never compromise yourself. You are all you've got.
Janis Joplin
#79. 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
#80. I can't talk about my singing; I'm inside it. How can you describe something you're inside of?
Janis Joplin
#81. It's hard to be free but when it works, it's worth it!
Janis Joplin
#82. But she was in love, and love isn't about making sense.
Laura Joplin
#83. I remember my mom dressed like Janis Joplin.
Bryan White
#84. 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.
Janis Joplin
#85. My years with Aretha Franklin have been very special, as were the years making records with Dionne Warwick. Other highlights include working with Janis Joplin, who was the first artist I ever signed, as well as Patti Smith and Alicia Keys.
Clive Davis
#86. People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards.
Janis Joplin
#87. Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.
Janis Joplin
#88. In my insides, it really hurts if someone doesn't like me. It's silly.
Janis Joplin
#89. You can feel all things at once, so why not wear all things at once?
Janis Joplin
#90. I started out to be a person on the street, just like everybody else. I didn't start out to be a singer. But I got sort of swept up in this singing thing, and after I got involved in it it got really important to me if I was good or not.
Janis Joplin
#91. As good as you've been to this world is as good as it's gonna be right back to you.
Janis Joplin
#93. 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
#94. Hollywood is about playing the game, and I can't think of any successful actresses who didn't play the game. There's a lot more renegades in the music business, from Patti Smith to Janis Joplin.
Madonna Ciccone
#95. Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music, and to shy bricks at 'hateful ragtime' no longer passes for musical culture.
Scott Joplin
#96. Janis Joplin is definitely one of my biggest influences. She taught me how to feel music, and I don't think there's anyone like her that could bring such pain and emotion to a song.
LeAnn Rimes
#97. I love the Beatles, and when I was very young, I had young parents, so Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles constantly were big influences on my life.
Phil Anselmo
#98. I think I think too much. That's why I drink!
Janis Joplin
#99. If you've got a today, don't wear it tomorrow. Tomorrow never happens. It's all the same day.
Janis Joplin
#100. Janis Joplin didn't just sing a song, she took it over. She swallowed it whole, then sent it back through her gut and her heart.
Scott Simon
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