Patti Smith Quotes

My public life was so demanding that I wasn't doing the things that I deemed the most important.

All of my role models, whether it was the disciples, or John the Baptist or Arthur Rimbaud, slept under the stars.

I wasn't a stranger to hard times. I used to read the Bible - well, I still do, but when I was young I read the Bible quite a bit.

I got my style from a lot of different people, even my style of reading, even Johnny Carson inspired me.

My mission is to communicate, to wake people up, just to give them my energy and accept theirs.

I wish I could just project everything on the paper.

Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn't live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.

I want to keep my life as unfettered as possible. So maybe I'll just pretend to get rare books from my catalogue, and not really get them.

The thing I've always liked about performing is that I decide what I want to wear, whether I want to comb my hair.

I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection

I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.

I didn't know Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, but I was affected by both of their deaths because I admired their work so much and mourned their youth and work they would never produce.

You're not a rock 'n' roll person four hours a day or even when you're on stage. It's become the rhythm of your whole life.

All the traumas I went through separating art from writing don't exist anymore. That's why I love being in rock 'n' roll. It's a whole life thing.

I'd try to write my poems in a certain rhythm. I had my rock 'n' roll stuff for performing and my denser stuff for writing.

I hated the soup and felt little for the can.

I didn't write about aspects of my public life because that's a small part of my life.

I've always considered myself a writer.

Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo - Jo being the writer and the misfit.

What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.

Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.

As an artist, I used to think that my responsibility was to do good work. But I had to learn from the 70s on that being a public figure presents another aspect of responsibility.

I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry.

He wasn't supposed to die, ' he cried out, somewhat desperately, petulantly, like a spoiled child. But I could hear other thoughts racing between us.Neither are you.Neither am I.

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the

Please, no matter how we advance in technology please don't abandon the book-there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than a book.

We didn’t have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.

He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin.

He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.

I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.

I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea.

It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.

All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms.

I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.

I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one

Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.

Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

I wanted to cry so bad, but my tears are inside. A blindfold keeps them there. I can’t see today. Patti, I don’t know anything.

Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.

He recognizes voices within silence. (of Max Sebald)

I paced while he slept, ricocheting like a dove skidding the lonely confines of a Joseph Cornell box.

And the eye became a body, the murky heart of a rose. The sinister shadow of an orchid. Or the indolent poppy balanced behind the ear of Baudelaire.

There's always new stuff, that's for sure.

A real prison breakfast" I said."Yeah, but we are free."And that summed it up.

He took twelve pictures that day.Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. "This one has the magic, " he said. When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.

Secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.

-What is nothing? I impetuously asked.-It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.

It ain't so easy writing about nothin

Bringing good news is imparting hope to one's fellow man. The idea of redemption is always good news, even if it means sacrifice or some difficult times.