Top 575 Quotes & Sayings by Patti Smith - Page 3
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American musician Patti Smith.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
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.
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.
If I feel any marginalisation, it's because the things that concern me aren't so important to other people.
There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it's really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work.
A day doesn't go by where I don't create something.
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.
If your label won't let you have the cover you want or sing the songs you want, then leave!
I'd just make sure with anything I say I know what I'm talking about.
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.
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.
The thing I've always liked about performing is that I decide what I want to wear, whether I want to comb my hair.
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.
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.
We never threw a record together. Each record was done really seriously, as if our life depended on it.
When I was a young girl, I'd love giving book reports.
I felt alien my whole life, but I didn't feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.
My father was a dreamy fellow - he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games.
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.
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.
I personally am not interested in people trying to pigeonhole me.
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.
I knew William Burroughs really well, and I was always star struck being around him. I adored him.
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.'
I'm not a very analytical person.
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.
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.
I didn't begin my life in 1975 with 'Horses.' I recorded 'Horses' in 1975, but was drawing in Paris in 1969.
I've lost lots of men in my life, besides my mother, which is a whole different loss.
My mother had no end of tragedy in her life. She would make herself get up and take a deep breath and go out and do laundry. Hang up sheets.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I liked being on stage; I just didn't like the theatrical aspect of being in front of people.
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.
My mission is to stay healthy and productive and serve as a good example.
I don't believe people playing rock n' roll should have crowns. We're not kings and queens. Anybody can play it.
I haven't had the most thrilling lifestyle. I was a pretty good dresser, but I would have a pretty boring 'Behind the Music.'
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Pop music has always been about the mainstream and what appeals to the public.
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.
I have bigger concerns than what pop stars are doing. I'm more concerned about our environment, what industrialists are doing to it.
It was no hardship to me to spend long hours reading and writing.
You can't carve up the world. It's not a pie.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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