My mission is to communicate, to wake people up, just to give them my energy and accept theirs.
Patti SmithI 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.
Patti SmithIt got to the point where I started hiding because I didn't want to be photographed. (On living with Robert Mapplethorpe)
Patti SmithAs an artist, I used to think that my responsibility was to do good work. But I had to learn from the 70s on that being a public figure presents another aspect of responsibility.
Patti SmithYet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.
Patti Smith