Patti Smith Quotes

Well I haven't fucked much with the past,
But I've fucked plenty with the future.

- Babelogue

The only thing you can count on is change.

Rock & roll is like a painting. Can great paintings still be done? It depends on who holds the brush.

Hail brother, the distant thunder is nothing but hearts beating as one.

It's not so easy writing about nothing.

I personally am not interested in people trying to pigeonhole me.

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

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.

I was real religious when I was young. I wanted to be a missionary.

We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand.
"oh, take their picture," said the woman to her bemused husband, "I think they're artists."
"Oh, go on," he shrugged. "They're just kids.

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.

It was no hardship to me to spend long hours reading and writing.

In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand.

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.

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.

First of all, anybody who has lasted 30 and went through the 60's is really a survivor.

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.

I am not really certain how original my contribution to music is as I am obviously an amateur.

There is only one directive: that the lost are found; that the thick leaves encasing the dead are parted and they are lifted into the arms of light.

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.

It seemed as if the whole of the world was slowly being stripped of innocence. Or maybe I was seeing a little too clearly.

When I was a teenager, I dreamed of being an opera singer like Maria Callas or a jazz singer like June Christy or Chris Connor, or approaching songs with the kind of mystical lethargy of Billie Holiday, or championing the downtrodden like Lotte Lenya. But I never dreamed of singing in a rock-and-roll band.

each possessed something the other wanted and, in that way, complemented the other.

I really feel concerned about young people within our present culture. Our present culture, we have to change. Change is inevitable and I wasn't raised in our present culture but it has great pressure that as a young person I never had. Material pressure, social pressure, visual pressure, how you look, and I just try to appeal to young people to think for themselves, to be their own person, and to ask questions and also be very attentive to our planet and our environment.

I was never going to become anything but myself, that i was of the clan of Peter Pan and we did not grow up

We never threw a record together. Each record was done really seriously, as if our life depended on it.

The things I thought would happen didn't. Things I never anticipated unfolded.

I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees near the railroad track in Germantown. Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was horny, but I was innocent 'cause I was a real-late bloomer and not particularly attractive. In fact, homely.

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.

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.

Christianity made us think there's one heaven.

For I desired, as Youth does, to be taken by the hand and hurled into the world.

He recognizes voices within silence. (of Max Sebald)

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.

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.

Even as a child, I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want to wear red lipstick.

I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return.

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

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.

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.

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.

Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.

You know, the dreams you had for me weren't my dreams," he said. "Maybe those dreamsare meant for you.

The only real success is when you've done something well.

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.

I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-changed.

The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.

My mission is to stay healthy and productive and serve as a good example.

A day doesn't go by where I don't create something.

I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf.

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.

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.

The cafe was empty, but the cook was unscrewing the outlet plate above my seat. I took my book into the bathroom and read while he finished. When I emerged, the cook was gone and a woman was ready to sit in my seat.
- Excuse me, this is my table.
- Did you reserve it?
- Well, no, but it's my table.
- Did you actually sit here? There's nothing on the table and you have your coat on.
I stood there mutely. If this were an episode of Midsomer Murders she would surely be found strangled in a wild ravine behind an abandoned vicarage.

Good news doesn't necessarily have to be a positive thing. Bringing good news is imparting hope to one's fellow man.

We never had any children," he said ruefully. "Our work was our children.

To be an artist is to enter into competition with god.

I immersed myself in books and rock 'n' roll, the adolescent salvation ...

Spare the child and spoil the rod, I am not sellin' myself to god.

Life isn't some vertical or horizontal line
you have your own interior world, and it's not neat.

I don't believe people playing rock n' roll should have crowns. We're not kings and queens. Anybody can play it.

One step into a living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was actually born in Chicago, and then when I was a toddler, my parents moved to Philadelphia.

I was thinking about what a magical portal this lobby was when the heavy glass door opened as if swept by wind and a familiar figure in a black and scarlet cape entered. It was Salvador Dali. He looked around the lobby nervously, and then, seeing my crow, smiled. He placed his elegant, bony hand atop my head and said: You are like a crow, a gothic crow.

I would always say to anyone, you make choices that are important to you. Don't allow yourself to be exploited by something as fleeting as fame and fortune. If you're presenting yourself in a way that important to you in communicating your vision, then so be it. No one should allow themselves to be exploited ever.

My siblings were a bit younger than me, and I was always entertaining them and making up stories.

In the '60s, I used to love rock magazines; I'd cut out pictures of Bob Dylan and John Lennon.

I revisit my book piles. Trying not to be sidetracked or lured into another dimension.

I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.

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.

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.

I've always considered myself a writer.

I think masturbating is a really important function in art. People don't like to hear that kind of stuff, but it's true.

I like really hot coffee, not too strong.

Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.

The most unshakable was called One Day-Two Day. The premise was simply that one of us always had to be vigilant, the designated protector. If Robert took a drug, I needed to be present and conscious. If I was down, he needed to stay up. If one was sick, the other healthy. It was important that we were never self-indulgent on the same day.
In the beginning I faltered, and he was always there with an embrace or words of encouragement, coercing me to get out of myself and into my work. Yet he also knew that I would not fail if he needed me to be the strong one.

If the postman is saying hello to you, then I feel like, wow, thats something special.

I was so horny in school it felt like my body was filled with electricity. I felt like I had neon bones or something.

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

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.

It got to the point where I started hiding because I didn't want to be photographed. (On living with Robert Mapplethorpe)

William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He'd appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.

Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.

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.

I wrote some notes on paper napkins for my forthcoming talk, then sat daydreaming about the angels in Wings of Desire. How wonderful it would be to meet an angel, I mused, but then immediately realized I already had. Not an archangel like Saint Michel, but my human angel from Detroit, wearing an overcoat and no hat, with lank brown hair and eyes the color of water.

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

You can't make a mistake when you improvise.

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.

We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away.

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.

I wasn't taking drugs or drinking. I was working and working and working. But I wasn't writing anything.

A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending.