Top 100 Patti Smith Quotes
#1. Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book.
Patti Smith
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Nothing was spoken, it was just mutually understood.
Patti Smith
#7. 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
#8. My son and daughter lost their father quite young, so we keep him present with us. It's just a daily practice.
Patti Smith
#9. I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates ...
Patti Smith
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. I was busy thinking about the mystery of expanding network of seemingly unasawerable questions.
Patti Smith
#14. Nothing will stifle your human evolution more than fame and fortune.
Patti Smith
#15. The only way I can lose my mind in bed is to destroy myself in a fantasy.
Patti Smith
#16. Good news doesn't necessarily have to be a positive thing. Bringing good news is imparting hope to one's fellow man.
Patti Smith
#17. 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
#18. I left Mephistopheles, the angels, and the remnants of our handmade world, saying, I choose Earth.
Patti Smith
#19. 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
#20. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I'd just make sure with anything I say I know what I'm talking about.
Patti Smith
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Rock & roll is like a painting. Can great paintings still be done? It depends on who holds the brush.
Patti Smith
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. We never threw a record together. Each record was done really seriously, as if our life depended on it.
Patti Smith
#35. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. I wasn't worried, though. I just needed a break and I wasn't going to give up.
Patti Smith
#40. - What are you writing? I looked up at her, somewhat surprised. I had absolutely no idea.
Patti Smith
#41. I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth
Patti Smith
#42. I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.
Patti Smith
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. As I grew up, one of my strongest allies has been my sister.
Patti Smith
#46. 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
#47. I didn't write about aspects of my public life because that's a small part of my life.
Patti Smith
#48. There's always new stuff, that's for sure.
Patti Smith
#49. We never had any children," he said ruefully. "Our work was our children.
Patti Smith
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. We are wooed, then mocked, plagued like Amfortas, King of the Grail Knights, by a wound refusing heal.
Patti Smith
#57. The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.
Patti Smith
#58. 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
#59. I've written a lot of prose. I just haven't published it.
Patti Smith
#60. Holding onto the naive belief that travel will open.
Patti Smith
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?
Patti Smith
#66. Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is.
Patti Smith
#67. 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
#68. I never really wanted to be a singer - not with any longevity. But I always wanted to be a writer.
Patti Smith
#70. 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
#71. He recognizes voices within silence. (of Max Sebald)
Patti Smith
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. I feel about politics the same way I do about religion: I find the best I can from different things.
Patti Smith
#76. We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away.
Patti Smith
#77. 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
#78. 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
#80. 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
#82. [W]ithout a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.
Patti Smith
#83. 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
#84. We tried not to age, but time had its rage.
Patti Smith
#85. I know fashion is a material thing, but we live in a material world and I love clothes.
Patti Smith
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Swift is the arrow, dark is the thorn, the slate is clean, the future awaits, awake.
Patti Smith
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Everyone has a creative impulse, and has the right to create, and should.
Patti Smith
#100. How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they're gone?
Patti Smith
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