Patti Smith Quotes

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 hand above turns those leaves of loves, all in all a timeless view. Each dream of life flung from paradise everlasting, ever new.

It was no hardship to me to spend long hours reading and writing.

As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag.

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 never really wanted to be a singer - not with any longevity. But I always wanted to be a writer.

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.

We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.

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.

Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.

No one expected me. Everything awaited me.

That's what artists do, that's what poets do - we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we've made in order to get to the core place where we started from.

I always hope that young people will think for themselves and also most importantly, understand that they should judge themselves on their own merit, their good deeds, however simple, to not judge themselves by what they have materially, by what other people think of them, through social media.

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.

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.

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

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.

Put down your cell phones, put everything away, and feel your blood pulsing in you, feel your creative impulse, feel your own spirit, your heart, your mind. Feel the joy of being alive and free.

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 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.

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.

I didn't write about aspects of my public life because that's a small part of my life.

Often the simplest song is the hardest to write.

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.

Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

I can't bear working with a click track, we're not click track people. But for "Mercy Is ..." we all got in one mind because the song is delicate; it's not a song that showcases a vocal or some virtuoso.

I think the film [Dream of Life] is life-affirming.

I don't think," he insisted. "I feel.

You can't make a mistake when you improvise.

My father was always talking about God, and I idolized my father, so I'd spend hours trying to have mental telepathy with God.

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

I had this idea that the coolest thing that could happen to you was talking with God.

Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn't live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.

Love is an angel disguised as lust.

A lullaby should be timeless because it's a timeless concept - the birth of the child.

First of all, anybody who has lasted 30 and went through the 60's is really a survivor.

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

I'm from South Jersey: The idea of eating a roll with olive oil and anchovies or some kind of sardine and drinking mint tea definitely comes from reading Paul Bowles.

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.

All of my role models, whether it was the disciples, or John the Baptist or Arthur Rimbaud, slept under the stars.

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

I feel about politics the same way I do about religion: I find the best I can from different things.

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.

We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.

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 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 don't think people should do biopics of living people. I'm totally opposed to that.

I watch a lot of crime shows. The head investigator always said to the crime solver, "What do you say?" And inevitably the other has to say something like, "Well I'm thinking he was shot in the neck with a certain gun and he seemed to be running." The solver has to picture what he's seeing first, and then express his own observations. The writer does the same.