Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.
Now that I'm here, where am I?
You are what you settle for. You are only as much as you settle for
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.
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.
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.
Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.
Guess what, I might be the first hippie pinup girl.
I always wanted to be an artist, whatever that was, like other chicks want to be stewardesses. I read. I painted. I thought.
My father wouldn't get us a TV, he wouldn't allow a TV in the house.
I can't talk about my singing. I'm inside it. How can you describe something you're inside of?
I've been looking around, and I noticed something: how much you really need to be loved. Ambition isn't just a desperate quest for positions or money. It's just love - lots of love.
On stage, I make love to 25,000 different people, then I go home alone.
On stage I make love to twenty five thousand people; and then I go home alone.
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.
You know why we're stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don't let themselves feel things.
I won't quit to become someone's old lady.
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.
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.
As it gets closer and more probable, being a star is really losing its meaning.
