Janis Joplin Quotes

Blues is like American Express. I don't leave home without it.

You don't have to live the blues to play the blues.

Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

We are trying to prove that the blues lives on forever and anybody in this place can sing the blues.

I have always felt sorry for people afraid of feeling, of sentimentality, who are unable to weep with their whole heart. Because those who do not know how to weep do not know how to laugh either.

I approach everything the same. I try to make it as real as possible, whether you gotta make people laugh or make people cry, it's always the same approach for me. But if I start doing pratfalls, somebody please pull the plug on me.

People think the blues is sad. They hear people moaning and such. That's not the blues. That's just somebody singing slow...The blues is about truth-telling.

I think people pick up on that. You use personal stuff and mix it all in - I definitely pull on that stuff in my acting.

I think that the best way you can get honesty across in your music to connect and relate to people is to be motivated by personal emotions, stories and feelings.

It's never hard to sing the blues. Everyone in the world has the blues . . .

The blues have always had some of the best times, best feelings I’ve ever had.

People have been brainwashed into believing that it's got to be down or it wouldn't be blues. But it's not so. It's got to be a fact or it wouldn't be blues.

People that can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration - joy and pain - sit side by side.

We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.

I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions.

I don't have a great intellect, and I can't compete with people who do. I feel certain things. And all I know, and all I can do, is what I feel.

I listen to blues music a lot and that's a good person feeling bad and celebrating that pain by releasing it in that kind of joyous fashion.

I believe love opens people up.

Jimi Hendrix was just so fluid. His hands were connected to his soul, you know? His playing was just so emotional. You could feel the fire, you could feel the blues. You could feel the sadness. It's unbelievable.

I feel like the blues is actually some kind of documentary of the past and the present - and something to give people inspiration for the future.

I think if we all acted the way we felt, four out of eight people at a dinner table would be sitting there sobbing.

A lot of the time it feels like… music is some sort of excuse to be a human. It’s kind of like people need that excuse to go and put their arms in the air and sing their hearts out.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it

The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits