“I had a lot of hurts and confusions. You know, it’s hard when you’re a kid to be different. You’re all full of things, and you don’t know that it’s about.”

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.

My business is to enjoy and have fun. And why not, if in the end everything will end, right?

Don’t accept the habitual as a natural thing. In times of disorder, of organized confusion, of de-humanized humanity, nothing should seem natural. Nothing should seem impossible to change.

I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist.

I like that confusion when people are speaking in the same language but still can’t understand each other. It’s also usually my experience of being in America – when I speak no one can understand what I’m saying.

Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics.

For those who confuse you, recognize that their confusion is theirs and your clarity is yours.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

Of all the ills that our poor … society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.

There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.