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.

I got treated very badly in Texas. They don’t treat beatniks too good in Texas. Port Arthur people thought I was a beatnik, though they’d never seen one and neither had I.

If I hold back, I’m no good. I’m no good. I’d rather be good sometimes, than holding back all the time.

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.

I’m one of those regular weird people.

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

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

My father wouldn’t get us a TV, he wouldn’t allow a TV in the house.

Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

I won’t quit to become someone’s old lady.

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

Don’t compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got.

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.

You got to get it while you can.

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.

Rock on out.

On stage I make love to twenty five thousand people; and then I go home alone.

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

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