Patti Quotes

#1. Life Lesson 3: You can't rush grief. It has its own timetable. All you can do is make sure there are lots of soft places around
beds, pillows, arms, laps.

Patti Davis

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. I'm a very stereotypical person ... and that's part of my flavor, I guess, because I tell it like it is.

Patti Stanger

#6. When there's friction in the house, the only answer is good manners.

Patti Page

#7. Girls are genius at getting through sexual abuse. Often the only way to get through is not to feel. And that is exactly what these fantasy worlds allow: They give girls a place to go so they don't have to be present in their violated bodies. Brilliant.

Patti Feuereisen

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Said good-bye to my corner. - What will happen to the tables and chairs? I asked.

Patti Smith

#12. 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

#13. Horses pretty much broke as a record in England.

Patti Smith

#14. I didn't waste my time on things I didn't love.

Patti Smith

#15. Acknowledge all man as fellow creation, but don't follow him.

Patti Smith

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. For writing, I get up early in the morning - 5 o'clock, 4:30. I'm a morning person ... So I try to do it while people are asleep. The mornings are the nicest.

Patti Scialfa

#19. You need to take care of the root in order to heal the tree. - Gullah Proverb

Patti Callahan Henry

#20. Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book.

Patti Smith

#21. When I was a young girl, I'd love giving book reports.

Patti Smith

#22. 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

#23. To get rid of depression, I swim with dolphins.

Patti Stanger

#24. Theria snarled at him.
"Careful my dear, your teeth are showing, and I imagine that is frowned upon here too ... Why don't you do yourself a favor and go pluck something. It will really do you the world of good," said Abaddon.

Patti Roberts

#25. My sunglasses are like my guitar.

Patti Smith

#26. I'm Jewish, I can say it. We're storytellers. We were the moneylenders ... Therefore we tell great tales to get what we need. I love Jewish men. They make the best husbands.

Patti Stanger

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. My favorite band was The Band, and nobody compares in my mind with The Band.

Patti LuPone

#31. Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.

Patti Smith

#32. I've always thrived on the encouragement of others.

Patti Smith

#33. I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.

Patti Smith

#34. All I do is stay in the kitchen and cook. I don't go there to party.

Patti LaBelle

#35. I like having the space of my own project.

Patti Scialfa

#36. Mohammed personally mapped out seven heavens. If he got to seven, you know there's more.

Patti Smith

#37. Often the simplest song is the hardest to write.

Patti Smith

#38. We should not center our lives on receiving praise and admiration. If we are secure in our faith, our identity will be based on the love of God, not the opinion of others.

Patti J. Smith

#39. I truly respect the people who are working. If they want an autograph from Patti LaBelle, they are going to get it. I have never separated myself from them. I never think you are better than the next one.

Patti LaBelle

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

Patti Smith

#41. 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

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

Patti Smith

#43. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I spent a good part of the day making everyone uncomfortable as I stalked Anna, trailing her through Patti's house. And it's just my luck the whole lot would be here to witness my temporary madness - Kope, Zania, Jay, the twins, Blake, and worst of all, Patti.

Wendy Higgins

#44. I would not call myself a veteran conspiracy theorist. Or an obsessed one. I pretty much peaked on the whole conspiracy theory thing in the '60s, with the grassy knoll, who really killed JFK, and who ordered the hit on Lee Harvey Oswald.

Patti Davis

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. I think some of that hopelessness of my generation got passed on to later generations - the sense of uselessness.

Patti Smith

#50. In matters of the heart it is always better to want something you don't have than to have something you don't want.

Patti LaBelle

#51. I think I'm constantly in a state of adjustment.

Patti Smith

#52. You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

Ellie Goulding

#53. What I like about singing is that, for me, it's a substitute for the psychiatrist's couch.

Patti Page

#54. Many a false step is made standing still.

Patti LaBelle

#55. 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

#56. It used to be a lot easier to get a book deal.

Patti Davis

#57. New York seems to be thriving, which I'm grateful for. But I would hope that they would figure out how to negotiate the traffic and limit the pedicabs, because it seems to me that it's becoming a more chaotic city.

Patti LuPone

#58. When I was young, all I wanted was to write books and be an artist.

Patti Smith

#59. Boredom is for the selfish.

Patti Digh

#60. I loved when my boyfriends would call me their Amazon girl.

Patti Hansen

#61. If you're a successful woman, chances are that you spend a ton of time working. You're probably on your email a lot, taking phone calls and going on regular business trips that don't involve your man. He can start to feel left out of a very important and very time-consuming part of your life.

Patti Stanger

#62. We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.

Patti Smith

#63. It was always my belief that rock and roll belonged in the hands of the people, not rock stars.

Patti Smith

#64. I was never without a book, just in case there were empty moments to slip into a life that wasn't mine.

Patti Callahan Henry

#65. I don't find R.E.M. to be nihilistic. There is a constant undertone of joyous optimism. I'm not going to kill myself to Patti Smith or R.E.M.

Michael Stipe

#66. I don't tweet, Twitter, email, Facebook, look book, no kind of book. I have a land line phone at my home - that's the only phone I have. If my phone rang every day like everyone else around me, I would lose my mind.

Patti LaBelle

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. We can create a different future - one simple, beautifully mundane, daily decision at a time.

Patti Digh

#71. I felt that the best I could do for my father, and the best I could do for myself, and my mother and my family was to stay open to the experience, and learn whatever I could at every step of the way as it was going on.

Patti Davis

#72. I think its very important that we enjoy our life, that we get everything we can out of it.

Patti Smith

#73. When you know you love someone, when you know it's finally the right time, you don't just wait around for the right words, you just say the sentences even if they're all mixed up and imperfect.

Patti Callahan Henry

#74. I wish I could have a recurring role on 'Modern Family'. I think 'Modern Family' is the best comedy on television. It's extremely well written, extremely well acted and directed.

Patti LuPone

#75. I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.

Barry McGee

#76. 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

#77. What I do know is that traditional gender roles are very real and flipping the norm is difficult for even the strongest, funniest, smartest men.

Patti Stanger

#78. 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

#79. I'm a planner, and most networks don't plan. Bravo doesn't plan. Bravo is lucky in a lot of ways - they've got a lot of great talent, but at the same time, they don't nurture it. They lost 'Project Runway.'

Patti Stanger

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. I've been writing and making my own music for a long time.

Patti Scialfa

#87. Anger is like the blade of a butcher knife - very difficult to hold on to for long without harming yourself.

Patti LaBelle

#88. I had to find a diet that would kick me back into dating shape, because I know that I can't date at size 8. I have to date at size 2. And it's just a fact of nature. Go get your injections and your chemical peels. You gotta look good to attract a man.

Patti Stanger

#89. -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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. To me, Ann Romney sounds like a better candidate than her husband. She put her MS into remission through horseback riding, alternative therapies, and a healthy diet. She knows how to pace herself. She has a sense of humor and an innate honesty, and her hair moves in the wind. Maybe she should run.

Patti Davis

#93. That's another lesson I've learned the hard way. All relationships will die if they aren't nurtured. Just as a flower will die if it's not watered. Because love is demonstration, not declaration.

Patti LaBelle

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

Patti Smith

#95. Nothing was spoken, it was just mutually understood.

Patti Smith

#96. 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

#97. [On her father, Ronald Reagan:] How do you argue with someone who states that the people who are sleeping on the grates of the streets of America 'are homeless by choice'?

Patti Davis

#98. So be we king
or be we bum
the reed still whistles
the heart still hums

Patti Smith

#99. It is not about how it ends; it is about the journey. The full story. You have to know the full story to care about or know the ending.

Patti Callahan Henry

#100. 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