Patti Smith Quotes

I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written Just Kids had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.

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.

Writing is not some quiet, closet act.

Pissing in a river, watching it rise.

I'm here right now and I want now to be the greatest time.

For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day.

Toyland, toyland . . . once you pass its portals you may never return again.

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn't know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch.

Will you pretend you're my boyfriend?

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.

The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.

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.

Got to lose control before you take control.

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

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.

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.

Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.

I'm more concerned with the work people do than their gender. When I was younger, I was pretty judgmental. Things had to be a certain way. Now I just want to see the work. It doesn't matter who does it.

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.

Ultimately, I want to make everyone horny.

After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.

We never had any children," he said ruefully. "Our work was our children.

When I was home, traditionally since I was young, I'd write in cafés. That was the romantic notion in 1963. Café atmospheres back then were different. The café life really stemmed from the Parisians' idea of it, with poets struggling over their poems and drinking coffee. No music, no sounds, maybe a little jazz, or soul, but mostly nothing. Now you go into a café and the music is really loud, people are having business meetings, they are on their cellphones. It changes from generation to generation.

I think its very important to not be afraid to experience joy in the middle of sorrow.

The only parts I like out of any of those women books is the dirty parts. But I don't think their dirty parts are any good, really.

I've always had a desire to write something and capture people's imagination like Peter Pan had captured mine.

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

People have the power to redeem the work of fools.

The bible is very resonant. It has everything, creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the bible and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan. Of course there are stories that are still relevant and inspiring; lessons that need to be taught over and over again. And they give people hope.

We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.

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.

I always thought my father [influenced me most] because he was so well read, I tried to model myself on him, but really as I go through life I realise it was my mother who gave me the most valuable instructions. I didn't understand or accept it at the time. She taught me to read and to pray - two things that have really stayed with me.

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

My sunglasses are like my guitar.

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.

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.

I've always thrived on the encouragement of others.

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.

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.

Life isn't some vertical or horizontal line -- you have your own interior world, and it's not neat.

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.

When I was a teenager, I had trouble getting a boyfriend, so I imagined Arthur Rimbaud or Bob Dylan as my boyfriend.

I use drugs to work. I never use them to escape or for pleasure. When you turn to drugs, all you're doing is turning inside, anyway. I only use drugs for construction. It's like one of my architectural tools.

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.

I know I'm a strong performer. I'm not an evolved musician.

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 realize that people need something to believe in.