Top 575 Quotes & Sayings by Patti Smith - Page 6

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

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

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.

The sea is greater than us - it has its rhythm, its art. It comes with our earliest memory, of respiration, breathing in and out.

I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.

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.

You can't work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.

Outside of society, if you're looking that's where you'll find me.

I love being alive. I like being a human being.

I'm old-fashioned. I think William Blake and people in the Renaissance people were multi. Look at da Vinci, he was involved in science; and Michelangelo was dabbling in poetry. Both of them were painters and sculptors but they also involved themselves with architecture. I honestly don't know what happened in the '60s and '70s. If you sang rock and roll in America at that time or were involved in expressing yourself through music like that, then many thought you couldn't possibly be an artist. That thinking is archaic.

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.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

I never had aspirations to go into politics or medicine. I always wanted to be an artist of some sort. I wasn't so politically motivated. I felt that the world from an early age was disappointing. My father taught me about the bomb, and it was eye-opening. From then on, I thought grown-ups needed to do a better job. I still think that.

A good artist's always got his hand in his zipper.

I was always a tomboy as a kid. I always had boyfriends. I was just a regular girl growing up in the late '50s and early '60s, but I was never really attracted to what the girls were attracted to: makeup, my appearance, homemaking.

Writing is not some quiet, closet act.

I like my time on earth. And no matter what kind of cards I've been dealt, I'm happy to be there.

One thing I like about getting older is things, your spectrum widens, your capacity for compassion widens.

Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?

All I've ever wanted to do was create freedom.

If you over-plan, you close the door on possibilities.

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.

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.

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

I always wrote like rock 'n' roll. And I always listen to rock 'n' roll as poetry.

It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to Him.

I've lost many, many friends through natural causes, through alcohol, through drugs, through AIDS. And every time I lose a friend or a loved one, it reminds me how great life is.

The best thing is to motivate people to do their own work. I'm not opposed to making money. But I started to play rock 'n' roll to motivate others, to shake things up, wake people up and to let other skinny, pimply marginalized weirdos know they're not alone.

I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords.

When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. "I can't do this," I said. "I don't know what to say." "Say anything," he said. "You can't make a mistake when you improvise." "What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?" "You can't," he said. "It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another." In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life.

I think it's good for people to see the positive beauty that can flower from the deepest grieving.

One thing I did have under my belt was, my mother lost her mother when she was 11. She mourned her mother her whole life and made my grandmother seem present even though I never met her. I couldn't imagine how my mom could go on but she did, she took care of us, she worked two jobs and had four children. She was such a good example of how to conduct oneself in a time of grief. When I lost my husband, I tried to model myself as much as I could on her.

I like energy. I like to feel it cracklin', I like sexual energy in a room, and I like tension.

John Coltrane, he talks to god. He starts playing his solo, he might play for 14 minutes. For 14 minutes, it seems like he's talking to god, but he always takes a hold of the melody.

I don't have an image of myself, when I'm walking down the street, like I'm a rock star or something. I'm a human being, I'm a friend, I'm a mom, I'm a writer, and I'm an artist. I do play electric guitar and all of that but in the end I'm just a person. I really don't live like a rock star, economically or socially. I still live a pretty simple life beside the traveling aspect of it.

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

I don't like answering to other people's philosophies. I don't have any philosophy, I just believe in stuff. Either I believe in something or I don't. Like, I believe in the Rolling Stones but not in the Dave Clark Five. There's nothing philosophic about it. Whenever I'm linked with a movement, it pisses me off.

The film [Dream of Life] is not really an amateur work, despite the fact that none of us have ever done anything like this before; aesthetically, none of us are amateurs.

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.

What is the impulse that drove to direct? To me, it seems so immense. Just having a rock 'n' roll band, or to go from the solitude of writing and to having to collaborate, is almost schizophrenic.

I've embraced rock 'n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock 'n' roll. But I am also engaged in all of these things separately.

There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immobile. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other's arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep.

There's nothing cool about being self-destructive.

Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.

Often the simplest song is the hardest to write.

The film [Dream of Life] doesn't hide anything, except maybe moments of sorrow or darkness that belonged to me.

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.

Ms. It sounds like a sick bumblebee, it sounds frigid. I mean, who the hell would ever want to stick his hand up the dress of somebody who goes around calling herself something like Ms.? It's all so stupid.

If I have any regrets, I could say that I'm sorry I wasn't a better writer or a better singer...When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep...An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn't know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch.

I think it's important for people to realize that we were all young, all naive, and also we had lived in a time that had magic.

I have seen a lifetime of transgender people and it was hard enough being gay in the '50s and early '60s. One couldn't imagine the cruelty that trans people had to face back then.

Sometimes you write passages that don't need to be rewritten. Performance is that for me. Improvisation, things that happen in the moment, are sometimes wonderful, or wonderful as a moment to be shared between performer and people, but that's it. There might be a strong bond between you and the people, a transformative night, but as a live record it might not translate.

Fate is like a secret friend that helps push you on into life.

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.

I'm okay with roaming around the world in my bunk for days on end. Maybe every third day I'll get a shower or stumble out at dawn and realize I'm in a field in Poland. I like that kind of life.

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.

I longed to read everything I possibly could, and the things I read in turn produced new yearnings.

Your soul was like a network of spittle.

...heroine: the artist, the premier mistress writhering in a garden graced w/highly polished blades of grass... release (ethiopium) is the drug...an animal howl says it all...notes pour into the caste of freedom...the freedom to be intense...to defy social order and break the slow kill monotony of censorship. to break from the long bonds of servitude-ruthless adoration of the celestial shepherd. let us celebrate our own flesh-to embrace not ones race mais the marathon-to never let go of the fiery sadness called desire.

Good press, bad press, whatever, only means a lot to me if it's writ by somebody I respect, by somebody I like.