Joplin: "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."

Joplin: "I'm one of those regular weird people."

Joplin: "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."

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

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

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."

Joplin: "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."

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

Joplin: "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."

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

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

Joplin: "Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable."

Joplin: "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."

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