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Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. - This is how I live, I am thinking. -- Patti Smith
I love playing the Fillmore. I love the walk from the hotel and climbing up those old, iron stairs that lead to the stage. I imagine Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors and all those other great bands climbing those same stairs. -- Patti Smith
I have a daughter who's 11 years old. Maybe she'll grow up independent and really really heavy and become a movie star and she'll play me in my life story. -- Patti Smith
I had to learn, really, how to rein in my energies and discipline myself. And I found it very very useful. I rebelled against it at first, but it's a good thing to have. -- Patti Smith
My father came a couple of times, but he always blamed his hearing loss on my loud amplifiers. So he didn't come anymore, but I had his support. -- Patti Smith
I had this idea that the coolest thing that could happen to you was talking with God. My father was always talking about God, and I idolized my father, so I'd spend hours trying to have mental telepathy with God. -- Patti Smith
My mother, who was a waitress, gave me white wedgies and a fresh uniform in a plain wrapper. "You'll never make it as a waitress," she said, "but I'll stake you anyway." It was her way of showing her support. -- Patti Smith
I always hope that young people will think for themselves and also most importantly, understand that they should judge themselves on their own merit, their good deeds, however simple, to not judge themselves by what they have materially, by what other people think of them, through social media. -- Patti Smith
Everybody's got to reclaim these thingspoetry, rock'n'roll, political activismand it's got to be done over and over again. It's like eating: you can't say,'Oh, I ate yesterday'.You have to eat again. -- Patti Smith
Without realizing it, I had said goodbye to traditional employment. I never punched a clock again. I made my own time and my own money. -- Patti Smith
In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth. For nothing is more precious than the life force and may the love of that force guide you as you go. -- Patti Smith
Smile for me, Patti, as I am smiling for you. -- Patti Smith
For me, personally, I think drugs are sacred and should be used for work. That's what I believe in. Drugs have a real shamanistic value. I can handle drugs. I've never had a problem. -- Patti Smith
He tried everything from science to voodoo, everything buy prayer. That, at least, I could give him in abundance. I prayed ceaselessly for him, a desperate human prayer. Not for his life, no one could take that cup from him, but for the strength to endure the unendurable. -- Patti Smith
- But we keep on going, he continued, fostering all kinds of crazy hopes. To redeem the lost, some sliver of personal revelation. It's an addiction, like playing the slots, or a game of golf. -- Patti Smith
What I say should always be prefaced with this: I'm not really politically articulate. I just try to be like Thomas Paine: what is common sense? So when I say these things to you, I am speaking from a humanist point of view. I just look around and see what's wrong. -- Patti Smith
If I'm taking a picture of Brancusi's grave, I know that there's something of him, of his mortal remains, beneath my feet, and there's something beautiful about that. -- Patti Smith
Acknowledge all man as fellow creation, but don't follow him. -- Patti Smith
The issue of gender was never my biggest concern; my biggest concern was doing good work. When the feminist movement really got going, I wasn't an active part of it because I was more concerned with my own mental pursuits. -- Patti Smith
-What is the song about? I asked.
-Death, he answered with a laugh. But don't worry, nobody dies, it is the death of love. -- Patti Smith
I was like one of the boys in school who flap their legs frantically under the desk. I always had this weird feeling between my legs and I had no idea what it was. I didn't know girls masturbated. I never touched myself or anything ... -- Patti Smith
We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark. -- Patti Smith
I don't wanna be equal with anybody. I wanna be above equal. I don't think most people are equal to me. I'd like to communicate with everybody; I'd like to do something universal, I'd like to have the hit record of the world. But that's not the same as being equal. -- Patti Smith
Ultimately, I want to make everyone horny. -- Patti Smith
Sometimes you're doing really well, then, after three or four years, everything inexplicably crashes like a house of cards and you have to rebuild it. It's not like you get to a point where you're all right for the rest of your life. -- Patti Smith
I think some of that hopelessness of my generation got passed on to later generations - the sense of uselessness. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
My son and daughter lost their father quite young, so we keep him present with us. It's just a daily practice. -- Patti Smith
I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,
that Joplin had the last drunken throat,
that Morrison had the last enlightened mind. -- Patti Smith
I've lost many, many friends through natural causes, through alcohol, through drugs, through AIDS. And every time I lose a friend or a loved one, it reminds me how great life is. -- Patti Smith
I was a lower middle-class kid. My family had no money. There was no room in our small house where there were already four kids, including myself, living. -- Patti Smith
Do not cast your boat on a river of tears, cried the tearing wind. Small hands are still, be still. She knelt then lay on her side, clutching a key, accepting kindness of endless sleep. -- Patti Smith
When I started making music, we'd lost a lot of our great people. Rock was moving in a direction I didn't like. Rock was my generation's revolutionary, sexual, poetic, and political voice, but it had become corporatized. It was going into stadiums. It was so far removed from its basic roots. -- Patti Smith
I remember the first club we played in San Francisco. There were a lot of people on motorcycles standing around outside, and I had trouble getting in. I didn't have any ID, and the guy at the door wouldn't let me in, even though I told him I was gonna be singing in there. -- Patti Smith
As a citizen, hopefully I'm humanist. As an artist, I'm free. -- Patti Smith
I didn't waste my time on things I didn't love. -- Patti Smith
I don't fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future. -- Patti Smith
I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth -- Patti Smith
Hopefully if you create something fine, people will relate to it, so you're communicating with people, and you're not in a void. On the other hand, because you're always creating and transforming, art always separates you - always. -- Patti Smith
Paths that cross will cross again. -- Patti Smith
When I'm writing a book, I don't have any responsibility to anyone. I'm solitary. I'm writing on my own. I write by hand. And I write every day. I mean, it's part of my daily discipline. -- Patti Smith
These things were in my mind from the first moment I entered the vocal booth. The gratitude I had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility for one's action.
Patti Smith -- Patti Smith
Pop music has always been about the mainstream and what appeals to the public. -- Patti Smith
I just know that young people suffer, and I also know music is one of the things that help you get through - music and friends. -- Patti Smith
Those were mystical times. An era of small pleasures. -- Patti Smith
For life is the best thing we have in this existence. And if we should desire to believe in something, it should be a beacon within. This beacon being the sun, sea, and sky, our children, our work, our companions and, most simply put, the embodiment of love. -- Patti Smith
Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it. -- Patti Smith
I was never going to become anything but myself, that i was of the clan of Peter Pan and we did not grow up -- Patti Smith
I was horny, but I was innocent 'cause I was a real-late bloomer and not particularly attractive. In fact, homely. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
The thing I've always liked about performing is that I decide what I want to wear, whether I want to comb my hair. -- Patti Smith
When I'm on my own with my camera, taking these pictures, it feels as if I am in a room of my own, a self-contained world. -- Patti Smith
Without noticing, I slip into a light yet lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue. -- Patti Smith
I come from a working-class family, and I've been working since I was 13, from babysitting to blueberry picking to factory work to bookstore work. And of course, being a mother and homemaker, the hardest work of all. -- Patti Smith
I have great respect for my parents. I got such beautiful things from both of them. It doesn't mean that we didn't have our rough times, but they were remarkable people who were open-minded, creative and hard-working, and had great senses of humor. -- Patti Smith
So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger. -- Patti Smith
Technology is 50% of rock 'n' roll - the magic, the art, the performance. If you don't have good technicians and a strong road crew who are devoted and believe in you and protect you, you're totally naked. -- Patti Smith
I had a handful of records, but when I was 11 years old, I liked Puccini as much as Little Richard. They both made sense to me. -- Patti Smith
I don't know why, the very first word on my very first record is 'Jesus.' I still invoke him as an entity to reckon with. -- Patti Smith
What will happen to us?" I asked. "There will always be us," he answered. -- Patti Smith
My siblings were a bit younger than me, and I was always entertaining them and making up stories. -- Patti Smith
Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn't live long enough to see the time they were ahead of. -- Patti Smith
I knew he didn't love me, but I adored him anyway. -- Patti Smith
My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. -- Patti Smith
I was never a singer; I can't play any instruments; I had no training. Plus, I was brought up in a time when all the great rock stars were male. I didn't have any template for what I was doing. I did what I did out of frustration and concern. -- Patti Smith
I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it. -- Patti Smith
We never had any children," he said ruefully. "Our work was our children. -- Patti Smith
Like Jean Genet, Robert was a terrible thief. Genet was caught and imprisoned for stealing rare volumes of Proust and rolls of silk from a shirt maker. Aesthetic thieves. I imagined his sense of horror and triumph as bits of Blake swirled into the sewers of New York City. -- Patti Smith
I don't think the Palestinian people or Afghan children or some other things I'm concerned about are at the top of other people's agendas - not right now, when America is going through such a recession and people are suffering across the board financially. But I think all that will change. -- Patti Smith
Everything here is a small offense and not of value as art or confession. It is not a whim. It is an attempt to peel another putrid skin. -- Patti Smith
Good news doesn't necessarily have to be a positive thing. Bringing good news is imparting hope to one's fellow man. -- Patti Smith
Not all dreams need to be realized. -- Patti Smith
When I was a young girl, I'd love giving book reports. -- Patti Smith
I was studying Francis of Assisi for quite some time, when Benedict was still the pope. And I was studying it for a song that I did for my last album, 'Banga.' -- Patti Smith
The thing is that as you grow through life, the pursuit of art and the pursuit of new ideas, all these things keeps your mind elastic. -- Patti Smith
It occurred to me that I was on a run of suicides. Akutagawa. Dazai. Plath. Death by water, barbiturates, and carbon monoxide poisoning; three fingers of oblivion, outplaying everything. -- Patti Smith
I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something. -- Patti Smith
We promised that we'd never leave one another again, until we both knew we were ready to stand on our own. And this vow, through everything we were yet to go through, we kept. -- Patti Smith
The idea of redemption is always good news, even if it means sacrifice or some difficult times. -- Patti Smith
Murakami is not here anyway, I thought. He is most likely somewhere else, sealed in a space capsule in the center of a field of lavender, laboring over words. -- Patti Smith
I started resenting how much art robs from life. I'd go to a party and I couldn't enjoy myself, even sexually. All I could think was how I was going to reinvent the experience into a piece of art. -- Patti Smith
I was attracted to Robert's work because his visual vocabulary was akin to my poetic one, even if we seemed to be moving toward different destinations. Robert always would tell me, "Nothing is finished until you see it. -- Patti Smith
We didn't have the phrase 'style icon' when I was young, but I have to say, I really copied Bob Dylan when I was younger: a little bit of Bob Dylan or a lot of Bob Dylan and the French symbolist poets - I liked how they dressed - and Catholic school boys. -- Patti Smith
a black granite cube containing only the character mu -- Patti Smith
Life is like a roller coaster. It's never going to be perfect - it is going to have perfect moments, and then rough spots, but it's all worth it. -- Patti Smith
Careful how you bare yer soul
Careful not to bare it all -- Patti Smith
I tried to write something about Jesse but couldn't, as her face echoed her father's and the proud palace where the ghosts of our old life dwell. -- Patti Smith
I paced while he slept, ricocheting like a dove skidding the lonely confines of a Joseph Cornell box. -- Patti Smith
I really don't want somebody writing something positive about me if they don't believe in it. I'd rather somebody write something real mean. I like reading bad stuff, it gets me excited. In fact, the only reviews I keep are the bad ones 'cause I think they're the cool ones. -- Patti Smith
When I perform I always opt for communication with God and in pursuit of communicating with God you can fall into some very dangerous territory. I have also come to realize that total communication with God is physical death. -- Patti Smith
Your work, coming from a fluid source, can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke then of holding hands with God. Remember, through everything, you have always held that hand, grip it hard, Robert, and don't let go.
(letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, 1970) -- Patti Smith
I've embraced rock 'n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock 'n' roll. But I am also engaged in all of these things separately. -- Patti Smith
I felt alien my whole life, but I didn't feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender. -- Patti Smith
People like beauty and purity. They pretend that's what it's all about. -- Patti Smith
Inside it he inscribed a few lines of poetry, portraying us as the gypsy and the fool, one creating silence; one listening closely to the silence. In the clanging twirl of our lives, these roles would reverse many times -- Patti Smith
The heavy scent of perfume and the red slashes of lipstick, so strong in the fifties, revolted me. For a time I resented her. She was the messenger and also the message -- Patti Smith
We need a new cosmology. New gods. New sacraments. Another drink. -- Patti Smith
I don't know about that. I'm not a very analytical person. I have various impulses. I've often quoted Walt Whitman's phrase "I contain multitudes." I understand that. -- Patti Smith
If you don't have what you need, just rock with what you've got! -- Patti Smith
I never really wanted to be a singer - not with any longevity. But I always wanted to be a writer. -- Patti Smith
Ultimately, we are not seeking others to bow to, but to reinforce our individual natures, to help us suffer our own choices, to guide us on our own particular journeys. -- Patti Smith
I believe we all have a unique journey, whether its a journey of pure energy, if there's any intelligence within the journey. But I think each of us have our own way of dissipating or entering a new field. -- Patti Smith
Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand. -- Patti Smith
Everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums. -- Patti Smith
The Chelsea was like a doll's house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. -- Patti Smith
As we headed back to Tangier we saw a shepherd guiding a camel with her calf. Rolling down the window, I called out: - What is the little one's name? - His name is Jimi Hendrix. - Hooray, I wake from yesterday! - Inshallah! he called out. -- Patti Smith
I got my style from a lot of different people, even my style of reading, even Johnny Carson inspired me. -- Patti Smith
New York is a great city. There is no question of that. It's such a diverse city. I've walked down the city and heard four or five different languages simultaneously. I think that's beautiful. -- Patti Smith
I was always trying to pick guys up. I'd ask guys out and stuff like that. I had no pride. I was the biggest lurch at dances, waiting for the ladies' choice. I'd lunge at my prey like a baby wolf. -- Patti Smith
I'm not part of any movement; I don't like being fettered. -- Patti Smith
I don't stay in one discipline because it's more lucrative than another. In fact, the most successful thing I ever did was 'Just Kids,' for which I had absolutely no expectations. -- Patti Smith
Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know. -- Patti Smith
I don't think public life in and of itself can destroy you. I think it's the way people react to it, and some people are more sturdy than others ... I don't think any one faction can be blamed for a person's self destruction - a certain amount of that has to be innate. -- Patti Smith
Patti, did art get us?'
I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. 'I don't know, Robert. I don't know.'
Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint. -- Patti Smith
People came at me with all sorts of offers, wanting to make me into a hard-core Cher. I had no desire for any amount of money to be reformed for someone's vision, because in the end, that's what you got: your clay in someone else's hands. -- Patti Smith
I believe myself to be an artist. That was my calling, to do my work, and what's most important to me is to do the best work I possibly can. And that is what means the most, that is what will endure. -- Patti Smith
Just because I've extricated myself from religion doesn't mean I'm not interested in the scriptures. I look at the Bible as itself. It's a holy book, it has incredible literature in it and beautiful poetry. -- Patti Smith
He is overcome with the disease of love, the drunkenness of generations past. When are we ourselves, he wonders, trudging through the snow-covered banks, his coat illuminated by moon-light. -- Patti Smith
In the beginning was real time. A woman enters a garden that is bursting with color. She has no memory, only a burgeoning curiosity. She approaches the man. He is not curious. He stands before a tree. -- Patti Smith
When I was a child, I was certain that I could remember what it was like to live on Venus; I could remember what it was like to live in the American Plains. I could remember. And it's ancient memory. We all have it. It's just that some of us access it more than others. -- Patti Smith
No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist. -- Patti Smith
For everything bad, there's a million really exciting things, whether it's someone puts out a really great book, there's a new movie, there's a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, or you have the best cup of coffee you ever had in your life. -- Patti Smith
I don't care whether they're men or women, that's bullshit. A good writer can get into any gender, can get into any mouth. When I write I may be a Brando creep, or a girl laying on the floor, or a Japanese tourist, or a slob like Richard Speck. You have to be a chameleon when you're writing. -- Patti Smith
To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom. -- Patti Smith
I gave you a wrist watch, baby, and you wouldn't even give me the time of day. -- Patti Smith
I had a really happy childhood - my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife. -- Patti Smith
Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time. A curtain of purple wisteria partially conceals the entrance to a familiar garden ... In a wink, a lifetime, we pass through the infinite movements of a silent overture. -- Patti Smith
Even as a child, I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want to wear red lipstick. -- Patti Smith
I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust. -- Patti Smith
The thing is, it's not uncool to worry about people who seem like they're going on the wrong path. There's nothing cool about being self-destructive. -- Patti Smith
I didn't love Jim Morrison 'cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new. -- Patti Smith
Most women writers don't interest me because they're hung up with being a woman, they're hung up with being Jewish, they're hung up with being somebody or other. Rather than just going, just spurting, just creating. -- Patti Smith
The genesis of my coat, made from fine wool, spinning backwards through the looms, onto the body of a lamb, a black sheep a bit apart from the flock, grazing on the side of a hill. A lamb opening its eyes to the clouds that resemble for a moment the woolly backs of his own kind. -- Patti Smith
My mission is to communicate, to wake people up, to give them my energy and accept theirs. We're all in it together, and I respond emotionally as a worker, a mother, an artist, and a human being with a voice. We all have a voice. We have the responsibility to exercise it, to use it. -- Patti Smith
I like really hot coffee, not too strong. -- Patti Smith
If the postman is saying hello to you, then I feel like, wow, thats something special. -- Patti Smith
It's not that I have compromised or anything, but it's always been important to me to take good care of myself and be a good example. I'm not much a role model in terms of hair care, though. -- Patti Smith
He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin. -- Patti Smith
I always wear the same thing onstage. -- Patti Smith
I wandered through Kino parlors and peered through the windows of the magnificent sprawling Grant's Raw Bar filled with men in black coats scooping up piles of fresh oysters. -- Patti Smith
There was an air of vague and unsettling paranoia, an undercurrent of rumors, snatched fragments of conversation anticipating future revolution. -- Patti Smith
What I really like is an intelligent review. It doesn't have to be positive. A review that has some kind of insight, and sometimes people say something that's startling or is so poignant. -- Patti Smith
One of my great goals when I first started taking photographs or showing them publicly is that people might want one for over their desk. That's my goal. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
Rock n' roll is dream soup, what's your brand? -- Patti Smith
In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre? -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
Throughout my life, I happily deferred to family, companions, children. -- Patti Smith
People say hello to me. I mean, sometimes the sanitation truck goes by and says, hey Patti ... -- Patti Smith
I voted for Obama. I was very happy when he won. But Obama hasn't really been able to effectively do anything that has made me ... He hasn't helped the environment. He didn't close Guantanamo Bay. He went deeper into Afghanistan. -- Patti Smith
I realize that people need something to believe in. -- Patti Smith
I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. -- Patti Smith
Sure I destroyed my guitar at every concert, but it was okay, because I'd always get a shiny new one the very next day. -- Patti Smith
I had a penchant myself for doing several things at once. I wanted to draw, write, speak. -- Patti Smith
So be we king
or be we bum
the reed still whistles
the heart still hums -- Patti Smith
We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. -- Patti Smith
Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents. -- Patti Smith
I'm a total failure at housewifery. I always have been, 'cause I daydream too much. If I start doing the dishes at one in the afternoon, I'll still be there at six in the evening. -- Patti Smith
Some things are not lost but sacrificed. -- Patti Smith
When I was a teenager, I had trouble getting a boyfriend, so I imagined Arthur Rimbaud or Bob Dylan as my boyfriend. -- Patti Smith
I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business. -- Patti Smith
Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book. -- Patti Smith
I'm from South Jersey: The idea of eating a roll with olive oil and anchovies or some kind of sardine and drinking mint tea definitely comes from reading Paul Bowles. -- Patti Smith
Pollution is a necessary result of the inability of man to reform and transform waste. -- Patti Smith
Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting. -- Patti Smith
Fate is like a secret friend that helps push you on into life. -- Patti Smith
Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one. -- Patti Smith
Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them. -- Patti Smith
I know I'm a strong performer. I'm not an evolved musician. -- Patti Smith
You can't make a mistake when you improvise. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
I think its very important that we enjoy our life, that we get everything we can out of it. -- Patti Smith
Life isn't some vertical or horizontal line
you have your own interior world, and it's not neat. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
We went our separate ways, but within walking distance of one another. -- Patti Smith
I don't think the area of Jerusalem should be part of a Jewish state; it belongs to all people, to Christians and Muslims and the Jewish people. -- Patti Smith
I knew William Burroughs really well, and I was always star struck being around him. I adored him. -- Patti Smith
I like revisiting my early work, and people like to hear it. I don't make people suffer through any experimentation or new material. When I go see an artist, I want to hear the songs that drew me to them, so I do the same. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
My father's mother was from Liverpool and she had this very beautiful English china. I only wanted to drink my cocoa out of my grandmother's cup and saucer. -- Patti Smith
I hate to be enclosed. I don't like bathroom doors - I don't shut them. In fact, in my house, I have no doors. -- Patti Smith
We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free. -- Patti Smith
I was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice. -- Patti Smith
It got to the point where I started hiding because I didn't want to be photographed. (On living with Robert Mapplethorpe) -- Patti Smith
I'm an artist. I'm interested in how art gets made. -- Patti Smith
I'm a human being, I'm a friend, I'm a mom, I'm a writer, and I'm an artist. I do play electric guitar and all of that, but in the end, I'm just a person. -- Patti Smith
New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city. -- Patti Smith
I'm sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say. -- Patti Smith
My parents were very well read. They were both New Englanders, not highly educated, but they had a sophisticated ... they were both very humanistic, and they were sophisticated readers. -- Patti Smith
I think guys are more emotional. Men are supposed to be the strong ones, they have pressure on them to be strong, but when it comes to sex men are much more emotional than women. -- Patti Smith
I imagined a lot of things. That I would shine. That I'd be good. I'd dwell bareheaded on a summit turning a wheel that would turn the earth undetected, amongst the clouds, I would have some influence; be of some avail. -- Patti Smith
I never thought of being a performer, never thought of being a singer, never thought of being a photographer. It's just the trajectory of my work. I go to the medium that serves the vision. -- Patti Smith
What is the soul? What color is it? I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged. -- Patti Smith
I love my little overgrown yard. And my house is wonderful. It's everything that I need. -- Patti Smith
I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. -- Patti Smith
Yesterday's poets are today's detectives. They spend a life sniffing out the hundredth line, wrapping up a case, and limping exhausted into the sunset. -- Patti Smith
Said good-bye to my corner. - What will happen to the tables and chairs? I asked. -- Patti Smith
When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William's secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel. -- Patti Smith
One day we'll go in together, and the work will be ours. -- Patti Smith
I hated the soup and felt little for the can. -- Patti Smith
I think I work in two worlds. I'll always try to kick through a wall. I did that when I was younger and I still have my way of doing that. -- Patti Smith
Behind her smile I could see o many other things, a catastrophic sadness. I had assisted to the selfless guardians of the unfortunate children who suffered infinite loss, their family, their homes, and nature as they had known and trusted. -- Patti Smith
Truthfully, I don't really think of myself as a photographer. I don't have all the disciplines and knowledge of a person who's spent their life devoted to photography. -- Patti Smith
We never threw a record together. Each record was done really seriously, as if our life depended on it. -- Patti Smith
I've said this over and over, but I'll say it a million more times - I'm concerned more about the death of a bee than I am about terrorism. Because we're losing hives and bees by the millions because of such strong pesticides. -- Patti Smith
Outside of society, if you're looking that's where you'll find me. -- Patti Smith
Its great thorns pierced the canvas, and its heavy fragrance rushed within, enveloping his sleep, becoming one with his breath, and penetrated the chambers of his exploding heart. -- Patti Smith
If your label won't let you have the cover you want or sing the songs you want, then leave! -- Patti Smith
The cult of celebrity in the '60s and '70s was really more reserved for movie stars or high socialites. Paparazzi didn't care about Janis Joplin. -- Patti Smith
In 1974, when I started working with the material that became 'Horses,' a lot of our great voices had died. We'd lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. -- Patti Smith
The people have the power to redeem the work of fools. Upon the meek the graces shower, it's decreed the people rule. -- Patti Smith
I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments. -- Patti Smith
The child, mystified by the commonplace, moves effortlessly into the strange.. -- Patti Smith
I longed to read everything I possibly could, and the things I read in turn produced new yearnings. -- Patti Smith
My mother was real and her son was real. When he died she buried him. Now she is dead. Mother Courage and her children, my mother and her son. They are all stories now. -- Patti Smith
I was real religious when I was young. I wanted to be a missionary. -- Patti Smith
By the time I was 10 or 11, I was completely demoralized. I thought, "I'm done. I'm never going to be a missionary," because my indiscretion column, whether it was little lies or stealing a Chunky bar, kept me from sainthood. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
Good press, bad press, whatever, only means a lot to me if it's writ by somebody I respect, by somebody I like. -- Patti Smith
I think we have a creative impulse where suffering can magnify our work, but so can joy. You can be in love and write the greatest love song ever. Sometimes I think too much suffering makes it difficult to do one's work. -- Patti Smith
Deep in my heart how the presence of you shines, in a light to last a whole life through. -- Patti Smith
How wonderful it would be to meet an angel, I mused, but then I immediately realised that I already had. Not an archangel like Saint Michael, but my human engel from Detroit, wearing an overcoat and no hat, with lank brown hair and eyes the coler of water. -- Patti Smith
Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself? -- Patti Smith
We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones. -- Patti Smith
I learned a lot from Arthur Rimbaud. People talk about how he wanted to be a seer and do that through the derangement of the senses. What they forget was that he also advocated, sternly and austerely, that one must be able to go through all that - and then articulate it. -- Patti Smith
Some of us are born rebellious. Like Jean Genet or Arthur Rimbaud, I roam these mean streets like a villain, a vagabond, an outcast, scavenging for the scraps that may perchance plummet off humanity's dirty plates, though often sometimes taking a cab to a restaurant is more convenient. -- Patti Smith
All of my role models, whether it was the disciples, or John the Baptist or Arthur Rimbaud, slept under the stars. -- Patti Smith
Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people. -- Patti Smith
When I was young, I was offered my first recording contract in 1971 and was offered quite a bit of money if I would change my character and be a '70s version of Cher. -- Patti Smith
Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional. -- Patti Smith
There is hardly a place in New York that you can't walk a block and a half and get a cup of coffee. Believe me, I've been all over the world. There's no place like that but New York City. -- Patti Smith
If we keep our little flame alive, our first feeling of enthusiasm of who we are, without the influence or intervention of others, we will prevail. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
First of all, anybody who has lasted 30 and went through the 60's is really a survivor. -- Patti Smith
I think it's really great that people share their work [on Myspace] and no one is paying for it. I think that's a very healthy thing and it's not a corporate thing. -- Patti Smith
I'm not a critic. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a philosopher. Arguing that punk has run its course is like saying painting ran its course after the Renaissance. Punk is an idea. It's freedom. And it'll be around 200 years from now for the people who want it. -- Patti Smith
Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too. -- Patti Smith
You can't carve up the world. It's not a pie. -- Patti Smith
People say the media is feeding the public's hunger for celebrity news, but that's the drug pusher's mentality. I don't think anybody would be pining for news about Angelina Jolie's babies if it weren't being given to them in the first place. -- Patti Smith
- I know that you are concerned about the fate of the driver, he said, but it's out of our hands. He placed us in real jeopardy and in the end my concern was for you. - Oh, I wasn't afraid. - Yes, he said, that's why I was concerned. -- Patti Smith
The thing is that any sophistication I have, aesthetically, comes from 'Vogue' and 'Harper's Bazaar.' In the '60s, I never missed an issue, even if I had to steal to get them. -- Patti Smith
If I feel any marginalisation, it's because the things that concern me aren't so important to other people. -- Patti Smith
A good artist's always got his hand in his zipper. -- Patti Smith
There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it's really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work. -- Patti Smith
I'd never had people drive me around, and then all of a sudden, if a car didn't come, I'd say, "Where's my car?" -- Patti Smith
I like making records right now 'cause I can express myself that way in a very immediate, physical sense. You can always write a book, but you can't always do a rock 'n' roll record that's gonna work. -- Patti Smith
Since I was a child, I hated having to deal with my hair. I hated having to change my clothes. As a kid, I had a sailor shirt and the same old corduroy pants, and that's what I wanted to wear everyday. -- Patti Smith
Mohammed personally mapped out seven heavens. If he got to seven, you know there's more. -- Patti Smith
Artists, musicians, scientists - if you have any kind of visionary aptitude, it's often something that you don't have a choice in. You have to do it. -- Patti Smith
My mother and father had so many ups and downs and stayed with each other and helped each other. My mother took in ironing and she was a waitress. My father was working in the factory and he did people's tax returns. -- Patti Smith
Let's just say that I think any person who aspires, presumes, or feels the calling to be an artist has a built-in sense of duty. -- Patti Smith
Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine. -- Patti Smith
We learned we wanted too much. We could only give from the perspective of who we were and what we had. Apart, we were able to see with even greater clarity that we didn't want to be without each other. -- Patti Smith
He found it was as easy to hurl beauty as anything else. (On Robert Mapplethorpe) -- Patti Smith
Robert Mapplethorpe, I met in 1967. He was a student at Pratt, though even as a student a fully formed artist. We went through many things in our life together. He became my loved one, then my best friend. -- Patti Smith
It was exciting just to stand in front of the hallowed ground of Birdland that had been blessed by John Coltrane, or the Five Spot on St. Mark's Place where Billie Holiday used to sing, where Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman opened the field of jazz like human can openers. -- Patti Smith
Horses pretty much broke as a record in England. -- Patti Smith
I packed my small suitcase in a haze of nostalgia for the present stream I was just about to divert, a handful of days in a world of my own making, fragile as a temple constructed with wooden matchsticks. -- Patti Smith
I'm not afraid of terrorism at all. I'm afraid of loss of our freedom, loss of mobility, loss of global comradeship. -- Patti Smith
The hand above turns those leaves of loves, all in all a timeless view. Each dream of life flung from paradise everlasting, ever new. -- Patti Smith
Grief isn't all tears. -- Patti Smith
Everyone thinks of God as a man - you can't help it - Santa Claus was a man, therefore God has to be a man. -- Patti Smith
I've always thrived on the encouragement of others. -- Patti Smith
I didn't feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it. -- Patti Smith
Thank you, I said. I have lived in my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards. -- Patti Smith
I was born in 1946, so I was born on the tail end of when everything was deemed important. You made things to last. If you came from a poor family, there was only one can opener. -- Patti Smith
Ms. It sounds like a sick bumblebee, it sounds frigid. I mean, who the hell would ever want to stick his hand up the dress of somebody who goes around calling herself something like Ms.? It's all so stupid. -- Patti Smith
I was raised Jehovah's Witness. I was in Bible school at five or six years old, but I wouldn't say that we were a religious family. -- Patti Smith
It was no hardship to me to spend long hours reading and writing. -- Patti Smith
My mom loved rock 'n roll. My father hated it. We couldn't play it when he was around. -- Patti Smith
For a brief moment I felt as if I might die; and just as quickly I knew everything would be all right. -- Patti Smith
Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know. -- Patti Smith
I was in musical comedy. And I did very well, but the memorization killed me. I'm not good at memorizing, and it gave me a lot of anxiety. I hated the makeup. I hated all that pancake makeup. I didn't really like dressing for parts. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
I'm always writing. And, I mean, I always counsel people when they call me a musician: I really do not have the skills of a musician. I really don't think like a musician, though I love music and I perform and sing. -- Patti Smith
It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171). -- Patti Smith
What I wanted in life always was to write something as good as 'Pinocchio.' I wanted to write. I wanted to evolve. I wanted to grow. -- Patti Smith
I just like living in certain atmospheres. Or I just like people as they are. -- Patti Smith
I immersed myself in books and rock 'n' roll, the adolescent salvation ... -- Patti Smith
We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves. -- Patti Smith
For I desired, as Youth does, to be taken by the hand and hurled into the world. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know. -- Patti Smith
I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea. -- Patti Smith
For a time Robert protected me, then was dependent on me, and then possessive of me. His transformation was the rose of Genet, and he was pierced deeply by his blooming. -- Patti Smith
Later he would say that the Church led him to God, and LSD led him to universe. He also said that art led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil. -- Patti Smith
What a drug this little book is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process. I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy but a delusional quickening in the blood. -- Patti Smith
An artist wears his work in place of wounds. -- Patti Smith
I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works. -- Patti Smith
I'm pretty moral about what I do. If I didn't think I was worthy of doing something, I wouldn't do it. I ain't gonna waste a bunch of people's time. -- Patti Smith
He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. -- Patti Smith
I try not to give too much advice, really, because people have to do their things their way. I got lots of advice when I was young, and I ignored most of it - the good and the bad. -- Patti Smith
People have the power to redeem the work of fools. -- Patti Smith
If you feel good about who you are inside, it will radiate. -- Patti Smith
I drew no line between life and art. I was the same on- as offstage. -- Patti Smith
The spirits rose like an ether that spun an arabesque and touched down as gently as a benevolent mask. -- Patti Smith
What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. -- Patti Smith
We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away. -- Patti Smith
My father was a dreamy fellow - he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games. -- Patti Smith
Spare the child and spoil the rod, I am not sellin' myself to god. -- Patti Smith
A real prison breakfast" I said.
"Yeah, but we are free."
And that summed it up. -- Patti Smith
The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there. -- Patti Smith
Put down your cell phones, put everything away, and feel your blood pulsing in you, feel your creative impulse, feel your own spirit, your heart, your mind. Feel the joy of being alive and free. -- Patti Smith
I wasn't writing, I wasn't drawing, and personality-wise, I was just completely arrogant. I'm not trying to be overly apologetic for my behavior - I wasn't evil. The lifestyle I had was one that lent itself to becoming more and more self-involved. -- Patti Smith
When I stopped performing for 16 years and lived in Michigan and was married and raising my children, I wrote about four or five books. I haven't published them. I just haven't gotten around to it for several reasons. -- Patti Smith
I was so involved in my boy-rhythms that I never came to grips with the fact that I was a girl. I was twelve years old when my mother took me inside and said, "You can't be outside wrestling without a T-shirt on." It was a trauma. -- Patti Smith
I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female; I'm an artist. -- Patti Smith
Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed. -- Patti Smith
Hey sister, you're just moving too fast, you're screwing up the quota. -- Patti Smith
An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn't know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch. -- Patti Smith
Nothing was spoken, it was just mutually understood. -- Patti Smith
Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves. -- Patti Smith
It was always my belief that rock and roll belonged in the hands of the people, not rock stars. -- Patti Smith
I like gettin' old. -- Patti Smith
Coloring excited him, not the act of filling in space, but choosing colors that no one else would select. In the green of the hills he saw red. Purple snow, green skin, silver sun. He liked the effect it had on others, that it disturbed his siblings. -- Patti Smith
I closed my eyes as if to join the maiden as the droplets rearranged themselves, forming a pattern resembling an elongated island on the rim of an undisturbed blankness -- Patti Smith
I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did. -- Patti Smith
Everything I came up with seemed irreverent or irrelevant. -- Patti Smith
It was an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my life. -- Patti Smith
I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates ... -- Patti Smith
The reason we did 'Land of a Thousand Dances' and 'Gloria' on 'Horses' was because I liked repetitious, three-chord rock songs, but I didn't understand that I could write my own. I didn't realize that you could use those chords a million times. -- Patti Smith
I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers. -- Patti Smith
A lot of children don't have a developed aesthetic. I did. I made early choices in life, even about cloth; I liked flannel and not polyester. -- Patti Smith
I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing - of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily satisfied, and resume my daily tasks. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills ... So my parents always struggled. -- Patti Smith
I remember when you were born, it was dawn and the storm settled near my belly. And I rolled in the grass and spit out the gas, and I lit a match and the void went flash. And the sky split and the planets hit, balls of jade dropped and existence stopped. -- Patti Smith
Writing is not some quiet, closet act. -- Patti Smith
Often the simplest song is the hardest to write. -- Patti Smith
Artists are traditionally resistant to labels. -- Patti Smith
My sunglasses are like my guitar. -- Patti Smith
I have bigger concerns than what pop stars are doing. I'm more concerned about our environment, what industrialists are doing to it. -- Patti Smith
Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book. -- Patti Smith
When I was young, all I wanted was to write books and be an artist. -- Patti Smith
I think I'm constantly in a state of adjustment. -- Patti Smith
I personally am not interested in people trying to pigeonhole me. -- Patti Smith
In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer. -- Patti Smith
- What are you writing? I looked up at her, somewhat surprised. I had absolutely no idea. -- Patti Smith
When I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I'm not interested in crimes. I'm interested in the mind of the detective and his process, which to me is a lot like the artist. -- Patti Smith
My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg. -- Patti Smith
My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. -- Patti Smith
I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf. -- Patti Smith
The dark stone in my heart pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth. Who is in my heart? I wondered. -- Patti Smith
People say beware, but I don't care. Their words are just rules and regulations to me. -- Patti Smith
You don't want to OD on improvisation. -- Patti Smith
I wasn't taking drugs or drinking. I was working and working and working. But I wasn't writing anything. -- Patti Smith
I don't believe people playing rock n' roll should have crowns. We're not kings and queens. Anybody can play it. -- Patti Smith
I always wrote like rock 'n' roll. And I always listen to rock 'n' roll as poetry. -- Patti Smith
In the period where I had to live the life of a citizen - a life where, like everybody else, I did tons of laundry and cleaned toilet bowls, changed hundreds of diapers and nursed children - I learned a lot. -- Patti Smith
Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview) -- Patti Smith
That whole thing about masturbating. Most girls, I guess nobody has to tell them, they just figure it out. I had to be told. Some girl actually had to show me a hairbrush and demonstrate exactly what to do. I just never figured that stuff out naturally. -- Patti Smith
Your soul was like a network of spittle. -- Patti Smith
Sometimes [people] seem to think I came out of the womb, you know, cursing, with an electric guitar. -- Patti Smith
I haven't had the most thrilling lifestyle. I was a pretty good dresser, but I would have a pretty boring 'Behind the Music.' -- Patti Smith
He wasn't certain whether he was a good or bad person. Whether he was altruistic. Whether he was demonic. But he was certain of one thing. He was an artist. And for that he would never apologize. -- Patti Smith
Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art. -- Patti Smith
I was so horny in school it felt like my body was filled with electricity. I felt like I had neon bones or something. -- Patti Smith
I could have a job as a teacher because I like talking in front of people. -- Patti Smith
There were no ashtrays and no sign of my philosophic cowpoke. I sensed he had been heading this way and most likely, spotting the spanking new paint job, just kept on going. I looked around. Nothing to hold me here, either, not even the dried carcass of a dead bee. -- Patti Smith
I love to photograph the tools of one's trade: Duncan Grant's paintbrushes, the typewriter of Herman Hesse, or even my own guitar, a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic. -- Patti Smith
I think it's important for people to realize that we were all young, all naive, and also we had lived in a time that had magic. -- Patti Smith
I didn't begin my life in 1975 with 'Horses.' I recorded 'Horses' in 1975, but was drawing in Paris in 1969. -- Patti Smith
The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children. -- Patti Smith
I'm a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I'm happy. -- Patti Smith
The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work. -- Patti Smith
Everyone has a creative impulse, and has the right to create, and should. -- Patti Smith
I would rather write or record something great and have it overlooked than do mediocre work and have it be popular. -- Patti Smith
For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day. -- Patti Smith
I remember when the Bic pen was controversial. They came from France. They were cheap, and when one was out of ink, you threw it away; you didn't dip it into more ink. -- Patti Smith
Will you take a picture? she said. I looked down at the bleak panorama and shook my head. How could I take a picture of nothing? -- Patti Smith
Most of the time, it seemed as if the piece was fully formed in his mind. He was not one for improvising. It was more a question of executing something he saw in a flash. -- Patti Smith
People wouldn't know this about me, but I adore ball gowns. I love their cut, their architecture and the thought of the hands of so many seamstresses working on them. -- Patti Smith
There's always new stuff, that's for sure. -- Patti Smith
Blessedness is within us all. -- Patti Smith
I think masturbating is a really important function in art. People don't like to hear that kind of stuff, but it's true. -- Patti Smith
I don't consider writing a quiet, closet act.
I consider it a real physical act.
When I'm home writing on the typewriter, I go crazy.
I move like a monkey.
I've wet myself, I've come in my pants writing. -- Patti Smith
I never had any dates. I never really had any boyfriends. I was the girl who did the guys' homework. I was really crazy about guys but I was always like one of the boys. The guys I always fell in love with were completely inaccessible. -- Patti Smith
Of course, every artist has 'minor works' that they do, but I don't think I have any 'minor disciplines.' Each discipline I approach as a major undertaking that I put my whole self into. -- Patti Smith
I left Mephistopheles, the angels, and the remnants of our handmade world, saying, I choose Earth. -- Patti Smith
Wisdom was a teapot, pouring from above. Desolation angels, served it up with love. -- Patti Smith
In the '60s, I used to love rock magazines; I'd cut out pictures of Bob Dylan and John Lennon. -- Patti Smith
Who can know the heart of youth except youth itself. -- Patti Smith
Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody - Paris for me was a Mecca. -- Patti Smith
As I go through life, I can see why my mother directed me that way, or why my father counseled me in that way. But some things you're open to when you're young, and some things you need to find out for yourself. I think that that's pretty universal. -- Patti Smith
It's no secret - I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all. I like 'Detective Frost.' -- Patti Smith
The only way I can lose my mind in bed is to destroy myself in a fantasy. -- Patti Smith
Nobody sees as we do, Patti he said again. Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was as if we were the only two people in the world. -- Patti Smith
Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. Tasks were completed, sump pumps manned, sandbags piled, trees planted, shirts ironed, hems stitched, and yet we reserved the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning. -- Patti Smith
I'm off balance, not sure what's wrong. - You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. - How do I find it again? - Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection. -- Patti Smith
My public life was so demanding that I wasn't doing the things that I deemed the most important. -- Patti Smith
I get irritated with the world. I get irritated with politicians. I get very irritated with governments and with corporations, but in terms of imagination - my imagination is always fertile. I'm either thinking of my own things or constantly engaged by the things that other people do. -- Patti Smith
The Lord gives us wings
He gives us a stomach
we can fly or vomit -- Patti Smith
The only thing I daydreamed about was being an opera singer. But I was so skinny and so pathetic that that sort of wasn't going to happen. -- Patti Smith
Just come back, I was thinking. You've been gone long enough. Just come back. I will stop traveling; I will wash your clothes. -- Patti Smith
No one expected me. Everything awaited me. -- Patti Smith
The air was heavy with unstable chemicals, mold, and the earthy stench of hashish. The fat of candles burned, great tears of wax spilling onto the sidewalk. -- Patti Smith
It's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing. I'm not a musician. I never thought of performing in a rock n' roll band. I was just drawn in. It was like being called to duty - I was called to duty, and I did my duty as best as I could. -- Patti Smith
People don't realize we have these built-in seven-league boots. The body can go anywhere. It is physically capable of sustaining almost any kind of abuse, or any dream. -- Patti Smith
Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen. -- Patti Smith
As I grew up, one of my strongest allies has been my sister. -- Patti Smith
Will you pretend you're my boyfriend? -- Patti Smith
I can only thank, as I have within myself many times through the years, this unknown benefactor. She was the one who gave me the last piece of encouragement, a thief's good-luck sign. -- Patti Smith
I get up, and if I feel out of sorts, I'll do some exercises, I'll feed my cat, then I go get my coffee, take a notebook, and write for a couple of hours. -- Patti Smith
Angel looks down at him and says, Oh, pretty boy, Can't you show me nothing but surrender? -- Patti Smith
I wanted to go to Portland because it's a really good book town. -- Patti Smith
Toys to deftly pluck up like animal crackers and deposit safely into a crate decorated with friezes of bright circus trains carrying aardvarks, dodos, swift dromedaries, baby elephants, and plastic dinosaurs. A box of mixed metaphors. -- Patti Smith
My camera is my friend, and I take it everywhere. -- Patti Smith
How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they're gone? -- Patti Smith
When you hit a wall, just kick it in. -- Patti Smith
No matter what anybody thinks about any of them, every record I've done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy. -- Patti Smith
The law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus inflence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination. -- Patti Smith
I'm not a very analytical person. -- Patti Smith
Nothing will stifle your human evolution more than fame and fortune. -- Patti Smith
New York is the thing that seduced me. -- Patti Smith
From very early on in my childhood - four, five years old - I felt alien to the human race. I felt very comfortable with thinking I was from another planet, because I felt disconnected - I was very tall and skinny, and I didn't look like anybody else, I didn't even look like any member of my family. -- Patti Smith
We believe we will raise the sky, we got to fly over the land, over the sea. Fate unwinds and if we die, souls arise. God, do not seize me please. -- Patti Smith
I loved being a rock and roll star, but it wasn't what I wanted in life. -- Patti Smith
We weathered all things, large and small, with the same vigor. -- Patti Smith
I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar. -- Patti Smith
I know that some people have different personas for the different things they do, and I'm not criticizing that - maybe it's a good thing - but I'm the same old person, so I take everything in stride. -- Patti Smith
The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time. Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express. -- Patti Smith
People called me the godmother of punk, but I never name myself anything. -- Patti Smith
I think its very important to not be afraid to experience joy in the middle of sorrow. -- Patti Smith
Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line. -- Patti Smith
The politics at Max's were very similar to high school, except the popular people were not the cheerleaders or football heroes and the prom queen would most certainly e a he, dressed as a she, knowing more about being a she than most she's. -- Patti Smith
I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world. -- Patti Smith
Swift is the arrow, dark is the thorn, the slate is clean, the future awaits, awake. -- Patti Smith
I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination. -- Patti Smith
I wish I could just project everything on the paper, -- Patti Smith
I like energy. I like to feel it cracklin', I like sexual energy in a room, and I like tension. -- Patti Smith
I was busy thinking about the mystery of expanding network of seemingly unasawerable questions. -- Patti Smith
It ain't so easy writing about nothin -- Patti Smith
Punk rock is just another word for freedom. -- Patti Smith
You can't change the world; you can't fix the whole environment. But you can recycle. You can turn the water off when you're brushing your teeth. You can do small things. -- Patti Smith
I walk alone, assaulted it seems, by tears from heaven. -- Patti Smith
More than anything, that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing. -- Patti Smith
The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication. -- Patti Smith
-I love you, I whispered to all, to none.
-Love not lightly, I heard him say. -- Patti Smith
I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work. -- Patti Smith
He recognizes voices within silence. (of Max Sebald) -- Patti Smith
If I'm really working on something, writing or painting or really concentrating, I don't even think about brushing my hair. -- Patti Smith
It seemed as if the whole of the world was slowly being stripped of innocence. Or maybe I was seeing a little too clearly. -- Patti Smith
The mind of a child is like a kiss on the forehead - open and disinterested -- Patti Smith
I wasn't worried, though. I just needed a break and I wasn't going to give up. -- Patti Smith
The things I thought would happen didn't. Things I never anticipated unfolded. -- Patti Smith
Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world. -- Patti Smith
I was both scattered and stymied, surrounded by unfinished songs and abandoned poems. I would go as far as I could and hit a wall, my own imagined limitations. And then I met a fellow who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When you hit a wall, just kick it in. Todd -- Patti Smith
Got to lose control before you take control. -- Patti Smith
Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words. -- Patti Smith
When I did 'Horses,' I never expected to make another album. -- Patti Smith
I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side. -- Patti Smith
Ornette Coleman is a real musician. He takes all of the things he's thinking about in the world - which is a whole universe upon universe - and translates this into music. -- Patti Smith
Well, I'm not one of those people who needs the limelight. If I'm performing, that's what I'm doing. If I'm not, I don't long for it. I don't need the approval of an audience, or applause. -- Patti Smith
I'd just make sure with anything I say I know what I'm talking about. -- Patti Smith
My parents were very humanistic, but where we lived was not the cultural center of the world. Hardly. So I came to New York for two reasons: to find my own kin and also to get a job. And that's what I came to New York for in '67. -- Patti Smith
each possessed something the other wanted and, in that way, complemented the other. -- Patti Smith
Holding onto the naive belief that travel will open. -- Patti Smith
I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords. That was my original mission. -- Patti Smith
I am not really certain how original my contribution to music is as I am obviously an amateur. -- Patti Smith
If I have any regrets, I could say that I'm sorry I wasn't a better writer or a better singer. -- Patti Smith
I revisit my book piles. Trying not to be sidetracked or lured into another dimension. -- Patti Smith
My father hated rock and roll - hated it. My first real argument with my father was over the Rolling Stones. And he never, ever liked rock and roll. He just liked me. -- Patti Smith
We are wooed, then mocked, plagued like Amfortas, King of the Grail Knights, by a wound refusing heal. -- Patti Smith
Nothing is a hobby - each discipline is its own world with its own high standards. Of course, every artist has 'minor works' that they do, but I don't think I have any 'minor disciplines.' -- Patti Smith
I had gone to Paris to immerse myself in painting and I came back wholly involved in words and rhythms. -- Patti Smith
I was a sickly child, not very strong physically. I wasn't really the greatest in school. I didn't really excel in anything particularly. But I was happy with who I was. -- Patti Smith
A wind picked up and I could feel the sea within it. -- Patti Smith
One step into a living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life. -- Patti Smith
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire. -- Patti Smith
We are guided by roses, the scent of a page. -- Patti Smith
Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
And when we went home he was unnaturally quiet and looked at me as if he wanted to convey all he was feeling without words. -- Patti Smith
I've always believed in having a sense of balance and stealth. -- Patti Smith
Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself. -- Patti Smith
My daughter is one of my greatest inspirations. She's an environmentalist, she plays piano, she's raising money for the earthquake victims in Nepal. Every day she surprises me and teaches me something. -- Patti Smith
Obviously, I'm not homeless. I'm not an old alcoholic. I'm not jumping trains. I just like to live in a certain way. -- Patti Smith
I've lost lots of men in my life, besides my mother, which is a whole different loss. -- Patti Smith
A disconcerting image of the cameraman thrown in a shallow grave passed through my sights; he sat up in the dark and noticed the blanket of his bed was made of sod. -- Patti Smith
I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it. - reference to Andy Warhol -- Patti Smith
My Morocco. I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing - of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
I never thought I was gonna live to 30. -- Patti Smith
the incisive observational powers of a female surgeon cutting out her own heart. -- Patti Smith
I was actually born in Chicago, and then when I was a toddler, my parents moved to Philadelphia. -- Patti Smith
I've always felt outside of things; I've always felt different. -- Patti Smith
Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is. -- Patti Smith
Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe, love is a banquet on which we feed. -- Patti Smith
These are the times, the times of our own, these are the shapes the world we formed. -- Patti Smith
I've written a lot of prose. I just haven't published it. -- Patti Smith
New generations have unprecedented power to make great changes. Take the music business for example. The new generations have toppled the music industry by file sharing, downloading, and Myspace. Rock 'n' roll belongs to the people. -- Patti Smith
I sang 'O Holy Night' with the Vatican orchestra, but also a Blake - a lullaby that William Blake wrote for the Christ child, and I set it to music, and the Vatican orchestra played the music. -- Patti Smith
I don't think the average American understands what patriotism truthfully is. That's why when I attack our country or attack the government, it's sometimes looked at as unpatriotic. It's not. -- Patti Smith
Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.
(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010) -- Patti Smith
C'mon, I mean who didn't listen to 'The Who' in the 60s? -- Patti Smith
I clawed through a thick web of the culture's consciousness that I hadn't known existed. -- Patti Smith
An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God. -- Patti Smith
My mission is to stay healthy and productive and serve as a good example. -- Patti Smith
Americans just don't know what being a movie star's all about. -- Patti Smith
My great quandary was what coat to wear and which books to bring. -- Patti Smith
I feel about politics the same way I do about religion: I find the best I can from different things. -- Patti Smith
I wasn't thinking so much of music. I wasnt thinking so much of perfection or stardom or any of that stuff. -- Patti Smith
I think really that's just the basic Christian lesson that sometimes takes us years and years to understand - have equal concern for another human being as you have for yourself or perhaps even more concern for another human being than you have for yourself. -- Patti Smith
Art is by nature optimistic. Art is optimistic because it is alive. -- Patti Smith
Usually when I go to a place for the first time, unless there's something historical or spectacular that nature has to offer, the first thing I like to do is see what's on the minds of the people. -- Patti Smith
The only parts I like out of any of those women books is the dirty parts. But I don't think their dirty parts are any good, really. -- Patti Smith
My mother answers all my fan mail. -- Patti Smith
All doors are open to the believer. It is the lesson of the Samaritan woman at the well. -- Patti Smith
The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel. -- Patti Smith
'M Train' is as close to knowing what I'm like as anything. I don't know exactly what the book is about. All and nothing, I suppose. -- Patti Smith
I have loved books all my life. There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book. -- Patti Smith
I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one. -- Patti Smith
If you over-plan, you close the door on possibilities. -- Patti Smith
It is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe they do. A child imparts a doll or tin soldier with magical life-breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys. -- Patti Smith
Why is it that we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we're gone? -- Patti Smith
I didn't write about aspects of my public life because that's a small part of my life. -- Patti Smith
My dad got a job in a factory in Philadelphia, so I was raised in Germantown in a sort of a barracks for soldiers. They had housing for temporary housing. And then my parents saved money and bought a little house in South Jersey, built on a swamp. -- Patti Smith
A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending. -- Patti Smith
I'm not really a musician. I'm a performer, and I love rock n' roll. I've embraced rock n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock n' roll. -- Patti Smith
Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person. -- Patti Smith
I don't think," he insisted. "I feel. -- Patti Smith
Friendship makes thieves of us all -- Patti Smith
I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. -- Patti Smith
I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection -- Patti Smith
Images have their way of dissolving and then abruptly returning, pulling along the joy and pain attached to them like tin cans rattling from the back of an old-fashioned wedding vehicle. -- Patti Smith
If I've learned one thing in life, it's not to be so judgmental of other people. -- Patti Smith
I'm more concerned with the work people do than their gender. When I was younger, I was pretty judgmental. Things had to be a certain way. Now I just want to see the work. It doesn't matter who does it. -- Patti Smith
He contained, even at an early age, a stirring and the desire to stir. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
We would work side by side for hours, in a state of mutual concentration. -- Patti Smith
I always enjoyed doing transgender songs. -- Patti Smith
I started thinking what could happen with my art and I realized that the biggest thing that could is that it winds up in a museum. It's like finding a rare animal and putting it in the zoo. -- Patti Smith
Toyland, toyland ... once you pass its portals you may never return again. -- Patti Smith
I knew one day I would stop and he would keep on going, but until then nothing could tear us apart. -- Patti Smith
I'm not really a nostalgic person. -- Patti Smith
I'm more materialistic about myself than I am about objects -- Patti Smith
Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted? -- Patti Smith
I have a lot of energy, and I like to work. -- Patti Smith
I hate being confined, especially when it's for my own good. -- Patti Smith
My mother loved rock and roll. She loved high-energy music. -- Patti Smith
In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand. -- Patti Smith
Light inspires me. I'm drawn to architecture, often graves, statues, trees - things usually that are quite still. I've been taking pictures continuously since 1995 until the end of Polaroid film. I'm taking very few pictures nowadays because I have very little film left, most of it expired. -- Patti Smith
It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to Him. -- Patti Smith
All I've ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful. -- Patti Smith
When we awoke he greeted me with his crooked smile, and I knew he was my knight. -- Patti Smith
I always hesitate when people call me a musician.I have had no musical training. I can't play anything. I really think of myself as a performer. It's always been writing for me. I evolved with my band in rock 'n' roll through poetry, not through music. -- Patti Smith
-What is nothing? I impetuously asked.
-It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer. -- Patti Smith
I got some coffee and stood looking at the sky. -- Patti Smith
As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag. -- Patti Smith
Time to travel, to acquiesce to fate. -- Patti Smith
My style says, 'Look at me, don't look at me.' -- Patti Smith
I was so unhealthy as a child, and at least three or four times my parents were told to get ready, that I would not make it. -- Patti Smith
I've always considered myself a writer. -- Patti Smith
I am still a very optimistic person. I continue to do work with joy. -- Patti Smith
Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph. -- Patti Smith
When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep. -- Patti Smith
He flashed a huge smile, one of absolute joy, from a place of no beginning or end. -- Patti Smith
I use drugs to work. I never use them to escape or for pleasure. When you turn to drugs, all you're doing is turning inside, anyway. I only use drugs for construction. It's like one of my architectural tools. -- Patti Smith
A day doesn't go by where I don't create something. -- Patti Smith
One thing I like about getting older is things, your spectrum widens, your capacity for compassion widens. -- Patti Smith
The only real success is when you've done something well. -- Patti Smith
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. -- Patti Smith
It's not so easy writing about nothing. -- Patti Smith
I work to Glenn Gould in the morning and go to sleep listening to Parsifal. -- Patti Smith
I was raised in rural south Jersey, and there was no culture there. There was a small library, and that was it. There was nothing else. -- Patti Smith