“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.”

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.

Don’t you know that you’re nothing more than a one night stand?

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

Man, there ain’t gonna be nothing left for Janis.

You can feel all things at once, so why not wear all things at once?

It’s hard to be free but when it works, it’s worth it!

Distance cannot kill this relationship. Time cannot breakdown anything we have. This is a relationship that I am ready to sacrifice and stand up for.

Maybe my audiences can enjoy my music more if they think I’m destroying myself.

I’d rather not sing than sing quiet.

That’s what rock and roll is for, turn that switch on, and man, it can all be.

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

When you hold somebody, you gotta hold them like it’s the last minute of your life.

And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I’ve drunk in a lifetime,

Beauty is in the hand of the beer holder. Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

I feel sorry for people who do not have a Bible to lean on.

You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day.

It is my aim to win the american people over to our side.

To make them all lovers of beer.

I suspect states are going to realize there’s money to be made, and they’ll start to change laws so people can distil to sell. It happened with wine, it happened with beer.

If in 1989 I said, ‘I have an idea: Bottle water and sell it. And charge more than a beer,’ they would have chased me around with a giant butterfly net. The same with paying to watch a television station.