"I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Patti Smith quotes (page 19 of 23)
456 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"One day we’ll go in together, and the work will be ours."
Read quote
3 likes
"You don't want to OD on improvisation."
Read quote
3 likes
"Will you pretend you're my boyfriend?"
Read quote
3 likes
"Grief isn't all tears."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"I am not really certain how original my contribution to music is as I am obviously an amateur."
Read quote
3 likes
"Talking to god and coming back because that's what we have to do. That's your responsibility as a director, as an artist, as a performer. Your responsibility is back again to your people."
Read quote
3 likes
"Sometimes I get lost in watching a film. The sorrow, or the frustration, is when it doesn't happen for a long time."
Read quote
3 likes
"I just know that young people suffer, and I also know music is one of the things that help you get through - music and friends."
Read quote
3 likes
"I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"People like beauty and purity. They pretend that's what it's all about."
Read quote
3 likes
"I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry."
Read quote
3 likes
"I'd try to write my poems in a certain rhythm. I had my rock 'n' roll stuff for performing and my denser stuff for writing."
Read quote
3 likes
"What I say should always be prefaced with this: I'm not really politically articulate. I just try to be like Thomas Paine: what is common sense? So when I say these things to you, I am speaking from a humanist point of view. I just look around and see what's wrong."
Read quote
3 likes
"Sometimes you have to abandon your own children for other children."
Read quote
3 likes
"All the traumas I went through separating art from writing don't exist anymore. That's why I love being in rock 'n' roll. It's a whole life thing."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"For I desired, as Youth does, to be taken by the hand and hurled into the world."
Read quote
3 likes