Patti Smith Quotes
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I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf.
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In the period where I had to live the life of a citizen - a life where, like everybody else, I did tons of laundry and cleaned toilet bowls, changed hundreds of diapers and nursed children - I learned a lot.
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I get up, and if I feel out of sorts, I'll do some exercises, I'll feed my cat, then I go get my coffee, take a notebook, and write for a couple of hours.
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I had a handful of records, but when I was 11 years old, I liked Puccini as much as Little Richard. They both made sense to me.
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We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.
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It was always my belief that rock and roll belonged in the hands of the people, not rock stars.
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'M Train' is as close to knowing what I'm like as anything. I don't know exactly what the book is about. All and nothing, I suppose.
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I like really hot coffee, not too strong.
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The issue of gender was never my biggest concern; my biggest concern was doing good work. When the feminist movement really got going, I wasn't an active part of it because I was more concerned with my own mental pursuits.
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Mohammed personally mapped out seven heavens. If he got to seven, you know there's more.
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I had a penchant myself for doing several things at once. I wanted to draw, write, speak.
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All I've ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.
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Look around you, all around youRiding on a copper waveDo you like the world around you?Are you ready to behave?
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I loved being a rock and roll star, but it wasn't what I wanted in life.
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My mission is to stay healthy and productive and serve as a good example.
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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.
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Maybe I'll be 48 and die in the gutter in Paris.
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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.
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It's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing. I'm not a musician. I never thought of performing in a rock n' roll band. I was just drawn in. It was like being called to duty - I was called to duty, and I did my duty as best as I could.
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Some of us are born rebellious. Like Jean Genet or Arthur Rimbaud, I roam these mean streets like a villain, a vagabond, an outcast, scavenging for the scraps that may perchance plummet off humanity's dirty plates, though often sometimes taking a cab to a restaurant is more convenient.
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We never threw a record together. Each record was done really seriously, as if our life depended on it.
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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.
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I always wrote. 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.
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If I feel any marginalisation, it's because the things that concern me aren't so important to other people.