Patti Smith Quotes

My sunglasses are like my guitar.

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

To be an artist — actually, to be a human being in these times — it’s all difficult. … What matters is to know what you want and pursue it.

Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.

My mission is to communicate, to wake people up, to give them my energy and accept theirs. We're all in it together, and I respond emotionally as a worker, a mother, an artist, and a human being with a voice. We all have a voice. We have the responsibility to exercise it, to use it.

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.

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

I wasn't attractive, I wasn't very verbal, I wasn't very smart in school. I wasn't anything that showed the world I was something special, but I had this tremendous hope all the time. I had this tremendous spirit that kept me going... I was a happy child, because I had this feeling that I was going to go beyond my body physical... I just knew it.

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.

Swift is the arrow, dark is the thorn, the slate is clean, the future awaits, awake.

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.

For life is the best thing we have in this existence. And if we should desire to believe in something, it should be a beacon within. This beacon being the sun, sea, and sky, our children, our work, our companions and, most simply put, the embodiment of love.

To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.

Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.

Art is by nature optimistic. Art is optimistic because it is alive.

Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world.

Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.

If we keep our little flame alive, our first feeling of enthusiasm of who we are, without the influence or intervention of others, we will prevail.

People have the power to redeem the work of fools.

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.

Wisdom was a teapot, pouring from above. Desolation angels, served it up with love.

What will happen to us?" I asked. "There will always be us," he answered.

Rock n' roll is dream soup, what's your brand?

I daydream a lot - that's how I get my ideas. If I'm sitting in a café, I'm not on my phone because I want to hear my mind. I think that those periods of small solitude that we are really losing are so important.

Paths that cross will cross again

Even as a child, I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want to wear red lipstick.

I think really that's just the basic Christian lesson that sometimes takes us years and years to understand - have equal concern for another human being as you have for yourself or perhaps even more concern for another human being than you have for yourself.

No one expected me. Everything awaited me.

I have loved books all my life. There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.

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

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.

New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.

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

People say hello to me. I mean, sometimes the sanitation truck goes by and says, hey Patti.

We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. "oh, take their picture," said the woman to her bemused husband, "I think they're artists." "Oh, go on," he shrugged. "They're just kids.

Love is an angel disguised as lust.

The people have the power to redeem the work of fools. Upon the meek the graces shower, it's decreed the people rule.

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

My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chickenpox, and mumps. I got them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope.

I don't think the average American understands what patriotism truthfully is. That's why when I attack our country or attack the government, it's sometimes looked at as unpatriotic. It's not.

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

Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.

I'm right here right now and I want now to be the Golden Age ...if only each generation would realize that the time for greatness is right now when they're alive ... the time to flower is now.

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

Got to lose control before you take control.

I wanted to go to Portland because it's a really good book town.

I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

Acknowledge all man as fellow creation, but don't follow him.