Top 575 Quotes & Sayings by Patti Smith - Page 7

He found it was as easy to hurl beauty as anything else. (On Robert Mapplethorpe)

Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?

I don't know why, the very first word on my very first record is 'Jesus.' I still invoke him as an entity to reckon with.

Steven [Sebring] was documenting me as a widow with two children, going from 50 to 60 years old. My focus, during that time, was to rediscover myself, stay healthy, take care of my kids and reestablish a relationship with the people.

I still don't want to be put in the feminist bag. I'm a humanist.

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.

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.

I'm a total failure at housewifery. I always have been, 'cause I daydream too much. If I start doing the dishes at one in the afternoon, I'll still be there at six in the evening.

I never had any dates. I never really had any boyfriends. I was the girl who did the guys' homework. I was really crazy about guys but I was always like one of the boys. The guys I always fell in love with were completely inaccessible.

In the '50s you had to wear pink ribbons if you were a girl, and you were supposed to become a hairdresser or a secretary. I couldn't stomach it. Later on, when I fell in love with my husband and had children, that's when my mother's earthiness or sense of femaleness kicked in.

I really don't want somebody writing something positive about me if they don't believe in it. I'd rather somebody write something real mean. I like reading bad stuff, it gets me excited. In fact, the only reviews I keep are the bad ones 'cause I think they're the cool ones.

I have abandoned so many projects but in the '80s when I left public life to be married and have real children - I love my children and I would never sacrifice them for anything - I had to find a way to simultaneously be a mother and wife and fulfill my duties and still be true to myself as a writer.

I didn't want any middle-of-the-road creep. I always wanted the toughest guy in school, the guy from south Philly who wore tight black pants. Y'know, the guy who carried the umbrella and wore white shirts with real thin black ties. I was really nuts over this guy named Butchie Magic 'cause he let me carry his switchblade.

I think masturbating is a really important function in art. People don't like to hear that kind of stuff, but it's true.

America is run by corporations, it is run by banks and Wall Street. That's why we can't get guns under control. It's because all these lobbyists don't want gun control, they don't want us to have strong environmental safety guards. Young people can become aware of that and they are the most powerful lobby. With a click of a text, you can have millions of people voting for one person.

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.

As a child I was such an intense daydreamer; I could be so gone that I had to be smacked to come back. They were really worried that I had some kind of catatonia or something because I would go so far out. Because all I wanted to do was talk to god as a child.

People don't realize we have these built-in seven-league boots. The body can go anywhere. It is physically capable of sustaining almost any kind of abuse, or any dream.

I'm estranged from social media and I don't really deal with it. I tried to work on a website and it took up all my time. People wanted me to have a Twitter account and I spent the whole day figuring out what would be the first message. I still haven't wrapped my head around it.

Technology is 50% of rock 'n' roll - the magic, the art, the performance. If you don't have good technicians and a strong road crew who are devoted and believe in you and protect you, you're totally naked.

We have to believe, as creators - just like a doctor doing heart surgery has to believe that he can save that person's life. You have to believe that your pursuit is not just a noble pursuit, but a necessary and inborn pursuit to uncover something.

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

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.

I was so involved in my boy-rhythms that I never came to grips with the fact that I was a girl. I was twelve years old when my mother took me inside and said, "You can't be outside wrestling without a T-shirt on." It was a trauma.

I wasn't taking drugs or drinking. I was working and working and working. But I wasn't writing anything.

I love my little overgrown yard. And my house is wonderful. It's everything that I need.

Look at Obama - he is now [2015] trying to help us environmentally but he should have done it eight years ago. He's trying to salvage his legacy and trying to do something good but we needed for him to show leadership from day one.

Spare the child and spoil the rod, I am not sellin' myself to god.

I like making records right now 'cause I can express myself that way in a very immediate, physical sense. You can always write a book, but you can't always do a rock 'n' roll record that's gonna work.

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.

I think it's really great that people share their work [on Myspace] and no one is paying for it. I think that's a very healthy thing and it's not a corporate thing.

As an artist, I never wanted to be fettered by gender nor recognized or defined as a female poet, musician or singer. They don't do that with men - nobody says Picasso, the male artist. Curators call me up and say, "We want your work to be in a show about women artists," and I'm like, why? For Christ's sake, do we have to attach a gender onto everything?

In any performance, you're on stage for two hours, and there's 40 seconds or maybe a whole five minutes where you feel like the whole universe is in place, and you've gone even beyond the universe that you know.

I worked for Hillary [Clinton] when I was young - when she was running for the Senate. I was fundraising and things, I see all of these people as political in a way that isn't humanistic. I'm just watching and hoping that someone is going to distinguish himself or herself as comprehending what we need.

Ultimately, we are not seeking others to bow to, but to reinforce our individual natures, to help us suffer our own choices, to guide us on our own particular journeys.

I think guys are more emotional. Men are supposed to be the strong ones, they have pressure on them to be strong, but when it comes to sex men are much more emotional than women.

New York is the thing that seduced me.

I don't think anything can prepare you for one's losses.

I was so horny in school it felt like my body was filled with electricity. I felt like I had neon bones or something.

The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.

I wasn't thinking so much of music. I wasnt thinking so much of perfection or stardom or any of that stuff.

What helps me is watching other people negotiate loss. I think about how we dropped a bomb on people in Hiroshima and 150,000 people were killed in one night. Those people had to mourn and they had to rebuild their city right away.

I'm very comfortable with being a female now but when I was a little kid I only wanted to be a boy. I didn't want to be a girl. I didn't feel like a man inside... being a boy was just cooler.

I started resenting how much art robs from life. I'd go to a party and I couldn't enjoy myself, even sexually. All I could think was how I was going to reinvent the experience into a piece of art.

I'm pretty moral about what I do. If I didn't think I was worthy of doing something, I wouldn't do it. I ain't gonna waste a bunch of people's time.

Steven [Sebring] just fell in with my family life. He helped me wash the dishes and play with the kids. I could tell that he was a person who understood families.

My father hated rock and roll - hated it. My first real argument with my father was over the Rolling Stones. And he never, ever liked rock and roll. He just liked me.

I had met Michael Stipe, and he was such a kind person, and extremely understanding, so I asked him if he knew a photographer who would come to Detroit, where I lived, who would be child friendly and who would respect my home. Michael suggested Steven [ Sebring]. One day a knock came at my door, and when I opened it, there was Steven. He's been like a brother ever since.

With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn't know who to work with.

I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates.

Sometimes [people] seem to think I came out of the womb, you know, cursing, with an electric guitar.

If I'm really working on something, writing or painting or really concentrating, I don't even think about brushing my hair.

My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.

No one knows how powerful technology is.

My mother loved rock and roll. She loved high-energy music.

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.

When I was a teenager, I dreamed of being an opera singer like Maria Callas or a jazz singer like June Christy or Chris Connor, or approaching songs with the kind of mystical lethargy of Billie Holiday, or championing the downtrodden like Lotte Lenya. But I never dreamed of singing in a rock-and-roll band.

He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language.

I have disciplined myself when I'm working. When I discovered art, I realized that one could keep that search going within creation. But I also realize that in order to create the art, you have to stay, you can't go too far.

I can't judge how another person does their [music] work. Everyone has a choice and the music industry is much more open that it was when I was younger. Certain things are gone, others have developed, but everyone makes their choices. Pop music has always been about the mainstream and what appeals to the public. I don't feel it's my place to judge. I just look at things as a fan, I like or or I don't like it.