Joan Jett Quotations

I'm concentrating on staying healthy, having peace, being happy, remembering what is important, taking in nature and animals, spending time reading, trying to understand the universe, where science and the spiritual meet.

Nobody knows what anticipation is anymore. Everything is so immediate.

I think I was born strong-willed. That's not the kind of thing you can learn. The advantage is, you stick to what you believe in and rarely get pushed out of what you want to do.

People don't want to see women doing things they don't think women should do.

My guitar is not a thing. It is an extension of myself. It is who I am.

You got nothing to lose. You don't lose when you lose fake friends.

For me the challenge isn't to be different but to be consistent.

I think there's nothing better than seeing a three-chord straight up rock 'n' roll band in your face with sweaty music and three minute good songs.

Girls see these defined roles they're supposed to follow in life, but when I was a young child, my parents told me I could be anything.

When you're onstage and the audience is smiling and singing and bopping along and you're all on the same level, it's the best feeling in the world. It may sound dumb and corny to say it, but it's like pure love.

If you really believe in yourself, you cannot listen to other people.

Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.

Other people will call me a rebel, but I just feel like I'm living my life and doing what I want to do. Sometimes people call that rebellion, especially when you're a woman.

Anyone who wants to know who I am can just read my lyrics - I've always written about who I am.

People like to tear you down. People are always going to take shots. You've just got to go for it.

I figured out it was a social thing, what women were allowed to do. At a very young age, I decided I was not going to follow women's rules.

I feel like it's my job to carry the torch.

We all make judgments on people, but some are much more brutal than others. It's easy to say, 'Ya know, I'm not crazy about what she's wearing,' but you don't have to be nasty about it, and you don't have to be public about it.

I love sports. I love animals. I love kids. I want to save the world. So how do I combine all those things? I don't know

You know I don't care if the world thinks I'm smart or not.

It's easier to sit there and say you don't like feminists because they don't have a sense of humor.

Beyond just writing about falling in love and out of love and wanting to do certain things and going out and partying and all the things that I grew up writing about, I want to write about deeper things.

I left my family, and I left my brother and sister, and I went and lived my dream. I saw everybody, but is it ever enough?

I remember times when I was at shows and the person onstage locked eyes with me. And in that moment, everything was right with the world. I think that's part of my job, to create these thousands of moments every night. And for the rest of their life, they can say, 'You guys looked at me,' or 'You sweated on me,' or 'I got your gum.'

Obviously, some people are thick, and they're not gonna see what they don't want to see.

Factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems. The meat industry causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, planes and ships in the world.

Aggressive, tough and defiant may describe me, but that leaves the impression I'm mean and I'm not. People expect me to have fangs.

Even though everybody's lives are different, in general we're all human beings, and we go through the same things: disappointments, the pleasures of life, life and death. That's always been a really big part of the show to me, making sure the audience feels connected, and that carries through to the album.

God, I always just think of myself as a jeans and T-shirt kind of person.

Performance-wise, you really need to be down in the trenches; you need to do the hard work, for a lot of reasons: To build yourself as a performer, to get a sense of the audience, to work hard and to wonder, 'Do I really want to do this?'

The follow your dreams thing is really important because so many people are railroaded into taking other paths by their family, their friends, people who should be supportive going, 'What are you talking about?' Even just seemingly regular career paths, but if it's not what people expect for you they kind of react funny.

I love to engage with people who come to see us.

I grew up in a world that told girls they couldn't play rock 'n' roll.

I'd like to just be a little bit more open to making mistakes and not worrying about it so much.

You want to have butterflies in your stomach, because if you don't, if you walk out onstage complacent, that's not a good thing.

If you're secure in yourself, and even if you're not secure in yourself, you don't need to bully.

Rock 'n' roll music is what gets me off.

I do not knowingly kill any living thing - including insects or rodents - and I thank my food for sustaining me.

Partly, I like a bad reputation. But I also want a reputation of being a good person.

I'm having fun opening up. Sort of struggling to get the audience into it. It's good. It makes you fight. Not fight like antagonistic. But fight for what you believe.

And you have a record company behind it, this is a key too, you need people to fight for your records, at least a little bit. So if you have a great song, it's catchy, and you've got a little bit of help, I think that's all you need. But there hasn't been that in music.

I like the way black looks. I think I look better in darker clothes. And maybe the fact that I wear black so much makes me more aware of putting people at ease. The black is sort of the bad-guy guise, so I work overtime to make people comfortable.

When I came back to it, we amicably separated from Warner Bros. I just picked up where I left off, trying to write the rest of this record. It took awhile to get out.

I want to be singing to everybody, and I want everybody to think that I'm singing to them. Guys, girls and everyone in between.

Cutting meat out of your diet is the best thing you can do for animals and your own health.

I don't like to say where I'll be in 10 years.

I had a blast doing the Warped Tour, but it's good to be home, for sure.

I leave for the show at least an hour ahead, and I do some vocal warm-ups, and that's pretty much it.

I think I look better in darker clothes. And maybe the fact that I wear black so much makes me more aware of putting people at ease.

I've done some acting and a lot of different things, but mostly it's the music.

Before I settled on music, I wanted to be an archaeologist, an astronaut, all sorts of really diverse things.

People are very sincere in their praise, and you can't take it lightly.

We were really grown up for our age and it was an incredible special band.

Why there aren't people out there willing to have fun playing rock 'n' roll. I just don't get it.

You follow any family around, you're going to see elation, you're going to see disharmony.

You know, I have a really tough time finding new bands.

I think what I'm going to do is get more balance in my life to still be able to go out and play the hard rock 'n' roll and do what I like to do in music

I've been doing this stuff for so long it's the one aspect of my life that I've paid attention to and really sort of not paid attention to the rest of it.

Def Leppard is obviously a different band that we are, but the music work well tighter. And the audiences seem work well together too. We are opening, but we're having a good time.

I wouldn't say no to other kinds of musical opportunities. I guess that it just depends on what it was or what it required me to do, and if I felt that it compromised my own soul.

We always play clubs. It's not something that I feel above. Those are my favorite shows because they're intimate, they're tight, their sweaty, they're hot. You're close to the people. Those are my favorites.

I don't know if I miss it per se, but I do miss the fact that there just doesn't seem to be any rock 'n' roll out there anyplace. Everything does seem kind of tame. It's even hard in Manhattan to go out and find a good band to go see.

So it was out of necessity that Blackheart was born. I think it's great that now, 25 years later, we're not only putting out our own music, but are able to put out music by other bands. That's really exciting for us.

I love school. I was a great student.

My parents taught me I could be anything in the world I wanted to be.

I bought one of those Learn How to Play Guitar Chords By Yourself and it shows you the diagram where to put your hands and I took that in my room, sat with my singles and learned how to play guitar.

The media says that equality for women has arrived, but if you look around, you still don't see girls playing guitars and having success with it.

Well, I'll tell you, I don't know how aware teenagers are of me. I think it really depends on the teenager and how well-versed in music they are and what kind of music they like.

I plan to stay in music. I plan to keep making records.

A lot of the songs I've recorded are songs I write.

I like to hang out with my friends. I love music. I like to go to the movies. I like to eat. I like to cook.

I was in drama, wanted to be an actor.

I'm not necessarily intimidated by really jocky guys. I can talk football with them, you know what I mean?

One of the mistakes I made was believing that the rock n' roll genre as a genre was much more free than the whole pop or R&B scene.

Pop music is not a threatening style of music.

So now 20 years later people want us to get together so they can take shots at all these old babes trying to get back some youth. I mean come on; I've been there. I know what the press would do.

A lot of people ask me why I don't expand and explore other musical areas, but I like the plain three- and four-chord rock-and-roll that I call the the semi-blues.

Blackheart Records being 25 years old represents staying power and the fact that we weren't able to get a record out through conventional means, so we had to create this record company to put out our records if we wanted to be a band that had records to give out to their fans.

I don't know if I get recognized necessarily, though I do get looked at a lot - but I don't know if it's because of who I am, or if people just think I look weird.

I really wanted it to be organic and coming from my heart. So, I think maybe the initial thought of wanting to go in that direction, I had to wait until things happened in our world and in our country that fired me up enough where the words came out organically.

I sure saw a lot of kids that I'm sure didn't know a lot about us, or we were definitely new to them. The kids who came up to me afterward, we'd talk about music, sign a lot of autographs. So I'm sure we made a lot of new fans.

Only because The Runaways were my baby and there's no reason to get it back together except to totally have fun. If that's not the goal, then I don't want to do it.

Shaving my head was a millennium ritual, to not let it pass as just another New Year's Eve. A lot has happened to me in the last couple of years, personally and spiritually. I wanted to mark it for myself.

No ones immune now, to a world of problems. No ones exempt now, from a world of pain!

I know who you are, and I am not impressed.

Well you know I've been in that place too where you worry about what everybody thinks of you, am I popular, do people care, are they looking at me, all that stuff. That's a drag, man. Having to worry about fitting in, am I cool enough to ANYTHING.

To be so superfocused and honed in on one thing can be good because then you get what you're supposed to get done, done but you also miss out on other things. I could have spent more time with my family, and a million other little things.

I consider that success for anything, whether it's being a musician or a writer. As long as you can support yourself, you're successful. People need to change their idea of what success is.

I tend to keep my private life private. I think it's important to have mystique. It's important to keep people thinking and guessing, and you want everyone to think you're singing to them.

When you're singing songs about love and sex, you want everyone to think you're singing to them. Whether you're a boy, a girl, a woman, a man - whatever you're into, I can be that.

Happiness doesn't necessarily lie in material things. You just have to put yourself in a position to be happy. If you can do what you love for a living, that's a good start.

A lot of the touring stuff has become a drag. Traveling itself is a drag. Anyone who's been to an airport knows that.

I know that sounds cliché, but mostly from my own experiences and things I see around me. We're all human beings, and a lot of the things I write about are pretty universal things.

I think the one-on-one gigs connecting with the fans - is the most important thing. That will help build your fan base. They'll talk about you, and word spreads. Those things are just as important as knowing how to play an E chord.

If it's just a pastime, keep doing it because it's relaxing and to blow off some steam. But if you're not sure if you want to do it, or you're thinking you can be famous, you shouldn't do it because you want to be famous. You have to do it because you love it and you want to play for people. And if that's what you want to do, then do it, but you can't go into it with that mindset of "we'll be in a band and we'll be famous."

If you are having trouble making a chord, get a book, that is how I learned. There are guitar tuning apps so you can tune your guitar, and just learn how to play along with your records. And it's great to be able to play along with another musician. That is like trial by fire.

I think it's what the times are demanding. If you're talking about the popular artists, they collaborate with a lot of different people and it seems to be in vogue now. It probably is indicative of the times.

The internet did not exist when I started out, the fact that bands can build a website and get all their information out there is really helpful. If you really love to play, I would say to keep doing it, because it's what you love and what you have to do.

It's very tough to give advice because it's tough out there for everybody but for a girl it's even tougher, because I don't think the glass ceiling has changed at all in the past 30 years. Otherwise the radio would be covered with girl bands, or girls in bands, so I don't think much has changed on that level. But I think that bands can still have a lot of success trying to go another route.

The most important thing is being genuine, and real, and not getting caught up in the "Star-Ness" of it. You don't want to act like a star around other people. You have to watch it, and you want to stay grounded, it's very important, and that's probably what I have learned most because you definitely have opportunities to let your ego run wild and you have to keep your ego in check.