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

All my life I just wanted to be a beatnik. Meet all the heavies, get stoned, get laid, have a good time. That’s all I ever wanted.

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.

They threw these musicians at me, man, and the sound was coming from behind. The bass was charging me.

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

Life is too damn short and [screwed] up to go through it silently loving someone and never telling them how you feel. [Screw]

Singing, it’s like it’s like loving somebody, it’s a supreme emotional and physical experience.

That story hit me right, man. I know no guy ever made me feel as good as an audience. I’m really far into this now, really committed.

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

I don’t know, I just want to feel as much as I can, it’s what ‘soul’ is all about.

I read a story about some old opera singer once, and when a guy asked her to marry him, she took him backstage after she had sung a real triumph, with all the people calling for her, asked, ‘Do you think you could give me that?’

And I decided then and there that that was it. I never wanted to do anything else. It was better than it had been with any man, you know. Maybe that’s the trouble.

Like most girls I’m always really self-conscious about do I look fat, if my legs are short, if I’m weird shaped, but when I go on stage, man, it never occurs to me. I think I look beautiful.

I’m one of those regular weird people.

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.

You can’t make up something that you don’t feel. I didn’t make it up. I just opened my mouth and it existed.

To be true to myself, to be the person that was on the inside of me, and not play games.

The problem was Mike Tyson always had trouble with bigger men.

The bigger the risks, the better off you are. Otherwise you’re just boring.

In 1950, the biggest amp you could get was no bigger than a tabletop radio.

A lot of people say that my life is wasted on me because I could be a bigger asshole than I am, but I’ve chosen not to be.

I like to think that we’re revolving on this planet and revolving through the galaxy. I love having context that’s so much bigger than I can fathom. It’s fantastic to realise how insignificant you are.

If I can tell someone a story that makes them bend over and laugh, that’s bigger than anything else.

The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.

Through the hardest times in life, I hope people turn to him and realize he’s still a sovereign God; he’s in control.