Top 100 Quotes About Patti Smith
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I'm partial to slouchier, more free clothing. My icon is Patti Smith, so the more rips, the more punk, the more comfortable I feel.
Troian Bellisario
#6. Punk-rock records came out and you bought whatever you could find. But Devo didn't happen for another three years. Sex Pistols didn't tour the States until '78. At that time, for me, it was really about CBGB, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and Television.
Michael Stipe
#7. I play the guitar. This year at the Sundance film festival, I joined the band from 'The Guitar' on stage. We warmed up for Patti Smith, and then the director Michel Gondry got on the drums to play some songs from the soundtrack to his film Be Kind Rewind with Mos Def. It was pretty mad.
Saffron Burrows
#8. I'm halfway through Patti Smith's memoir 'Just Kids,' which is heart-stoppingly vivid. It drips with beauty and hope and devastating candour. I don't want it to end.
Hattie Morahan
#9. Hollywood is about playing the game, and I can't think of any successful actresses who didn't play the game. There's a lot more renegades in the music business, from Patti Smith to Janis Joplin.
Madonna Ciccone
#10. Any alphabet book for children where 'P is for Patti' Smith and 'X is for the women whose names we don't know' is something I can recommend, especially when the book is as well written, representationa lly diverse and vividly illustrated as this one.
Francesca Lia Block
#11. Ed Friedman: [talking about Patti Smith] One time she told me, "Allen Ginsberg thought I was a cute boy and he tried to pick me up, so I said, "LOOK AT THE TITS, ALLEN! NOTICE THE TITS!
Legs McNeil
#12. There were a lot of people doing new and interesting things with rock. But I wanted to take it farther than that. My real influence was punk. I must have listened to the first Patti Smith album 300 times.
Glenn Branca
#13. My years with Aretha Franklin have been very special, as were the years making records with Dionne Warwick. Other highlights include working with Janis Joplin, who was the first artist I ever signed, as well as Patti Smith and Alicia Keys.
Clive Davis
#14. I wish I could have hung out with Patti Smith in the seventies, and also have some crazy times.
Ellie Goulding
#15. I was very aware of performers who have a persona, whether it's Siouxsie Sioux or Patti Smith or Lydia Lunch, and I'm just this middle-class girl coming from a more conventional upbringing, this California person. But in a way I felt like it's important to represent the normal.
Kim Gordon
#16. [Columbia House] magazines were how I found out about the punk world going on in New York. Because of what I read, at the age of 15, I hounded the local record store to order a copy of Horses [1975] for me by Patti Smith.
Michael Stipe
#17. I'm absolutely obsessed with The Jesus And Mary Chain and Patti Smith, but I'm a massive pop fan. I love pop culture, It's a total reflection of the zeitgeist.
Siobhan Fahey
#18. I like Patti Smith's lyrics, and sometimes think I could be influenced by them. But she has a kind of cool that's beyond me.
Alice Oswald
#19. The photograph, the clothes, the sets - this was about 1974, and I started hanging out with my friend Richard Sold, who was playing in a band with Patti Smith.
Stephen Sprouse
#20. When I can focus on something like guitar or painting, I do. I started painting people I admire, like Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, Marlon Brando, Patti Smith, my girl, my kids.
Johnny Depp
#21. The first time I met Patti Smith was in a laundromat. We knew some of the same people, including Richard Hell.
Tom Verlaine
#22. I was pretty taken with Patti Smith, she was my heroine.
Gavin Rossdale
#23. I think the last book I cried in was Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I don't shy away from crying, though. I actually really enjoy being moved like that.
Albert Hammond Jr.
#24. Things tends to often [consolidate] like Disney. It's the same with music. There's Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young and Patti Smith. There's these three people that everyone seems to agree on. No matter what they like, they seem to like those three.
Stephen Malkmus
#25. I love to sing old Motown songs to myself, or some Patti Smith Edith Piaf or Billie Holiday. That gets me in the mood for singing.
Siobhan Fahey
#26. You don't have favorites among your offspring, and you don't among the artists you're involved with, but clearly among my most favorite was Patti Smith.
Clive Davis
#27. I have total respect for the self-contained rock artist. Whether you're dealing with Jerry Garcia or Lou Reed or Patti Smith or a Whitney or an Aretha, they know what they want with their career.
Clive Davis
#28. I love a lot of the New York bands, but Patti Smith stands out. I just read 'Just Kids' and it's an inspirational, well-written account of an emerging New York artist in the late seventies.
James Iha
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Said good-bye to my corner. - What will happen to the tables and chairs? I asked.
Patti Smith
#36. 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
#37. Horses pretty much broke as a record in England.
Patti Smith
#38. I didn't waste my time on things I didn't love.
Patti Smith
#39. Acknowledge all man as fellow creation, but don't follow him.
Patti Smith
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book.
Patti Smith
#43. When I was a young girl, I'd love giving book reports.
Patti Smith
#44. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.
Patti Smith
#50. I've always thrived on the encouragement of others.
Patti Smith
#51. I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.
Patti Smith
#52. Mohammed personally mapped out seven heavens. If he got to seven, you know there's more.
Patti Smith
#53. Often the simplest song is the hardest to write.
Patti Smith
#54. 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
#55. I personally am not interested in people trying to pigeonhole me.
Patti Smith
#56. 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
#57. Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.
Patti Smith
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. I think some of that hopelessness of my generation got passed on to later generations - the sense of uselessness.
Patti Smith
#63. I think I'm constantly in a state of adjustment.
Patti Smith
#64. 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
#65. When I was young, all I wanted was to write books and be an artist.
Patti Smith
#66. We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.
Patti Smith
#67. It was always my belief that rock and roll belonged in the hands of the people, not rock stars.
Patti Smith
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. I think its very important that we enjoy our life, that we get everything we can out of it.
Patti Smith
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. -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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. I knew if I lived long enough I would be poet laureate of something.
Patti Smith
#84. Nothing was spoken, it was just mutually understood.
Patti Smith
#85. 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
#86. So be we king
or be we bum
the reed still whistles
the heart still hums
Patti Smith
#87. 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
#88. If the postman is saying hello to you, then I feel like, wow, thats something special.
Patti Smith
#89. My son and daughter lost their father quite young, so we keep him present with us. It's just a daily practice.
Patti Smith
#90. I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates ...
Patti Smith
#91. 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
#92. Some things are not lost but sacrificed.
Patti Smith
#93. I knew he didn't love me, but I adored him anyway.
Patti Smith
#94. It was an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my life.
Patti Smith
#95. Everything I came up with seemed irreverent or irrelevant.
Patti Smith
#96. One day we'll go in together, and the work will be ours.
Patti Smith
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
