Janis Joplin Quotes

It's a great challenge and a wonderful journey how to figure out how to be an artist and to carve my way.

I didn't start to be an artist myself until I was 24.

My growth as an artist and a person has been so slow and gradual, it's hard to make a story out of it.

I was very young when I did 'I Blame Coco,' and I never really recognized that sound as me.

For the longest time, I didn't even want to admit I was serious about music. Before the Shins, I would tell myself, 'Oh, I'm going to figure something out someday.' I had this romantic vision of being this old dude maybe making guitars or something.

I grew up with art from the innocent age of ten - with art, but with no sense of identity.

I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.

So don't think in reality I am a singer, I think I am a human being that has sung always all her life, and has learned a little to sing, and has found herself in the middle of a career.

I don't look at my films or my old drawings much, so that was an interesting way to kind of reconnect with myself a bit.

The first album was a very successful record. It made me very visible and it's an immediate association, but I don't do that anymore. Now I'm true to myself as an artist again. I'm more vocally oriented.

I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work.

I realized that I didn't want to do anything else. Plus, I realized I was good, and, most importantly, I actually loved to sing on stage.

You have to be clear what your message is and what you're doing. I mean, Miley Cyrus is an amazing talent, and sometimes you kind of just want to say, 'We know you're not Hannah Montana anymore. We know that, my dear. My darling. Now, go be great.'

I feel like I always describe myself as a late bloomer. My first album, in my mind, was that I had a few songs I needed to take from incomplete demos to working with someone else and finishing them.

It's really great to see an actor find himself, in his sojourn.

As an artist, you keep learning. You draw out different parts of you.

I believe later in life I'm gonna change my name when I start making the right music.

I arrived in the U.S. for graduate study in literature in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I began to paint, even though I had come to the U.S. intending to become a writer.

My personal life, my musical life, my life as an artist - almost everything has pointed all these little arrows that make up which way I go as a person and what I feel comfortable as my identity.

I learned from my teachers but became through my music

The moving toward one's inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.

I have no idea how I do anything. I never have. You know I just started playing guitar and started singing and started working on this act that I would call "Don McLean" when I was probably in high school. And I have been doing this for 40 years, adding songs and writing things, cobbling together albums, doing live things, you know, albums and tours. And then I have records on the charts. I have no idea how this happened.

I was not reluctant to become a singer. Singing has been an activity I've done my whole life, without thought.

I've always written poetry but I didn't realise it was a therapy for me until I was maybe 15. That's when my singing started to come together as well because I was listening to so much jazz. What I love I will always embrace.

It was during this [as a kid] time that I came out of my shell vocally and performance wise, I learned how to really and truly sing in a different way.... my way. It was an amazing experience because I also realized my lifelong dream - to sing my own songs...I have something to say and it was a great release for me to share that part of myself with others.