Patti Smith Quotes

• "Americans just don't know what being a movie star's all about."
• "An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God."
• "An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn't know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch."
• "Artists are traditionally resistant to labels."
• "Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star."
• "Christianity made us think there's one heaven."
• "Everyone thinks of God as a man - you can't help it - Santa Claus was a man, therefore God has to be a man."
• "First of all, anybody who has lasted 30 and went through the 60's is really a survivor."
• "Fred and I raised our children ourselves, and we went through the same kinds of firings other people did, including financial difficulties."
• "Horses pretty much broke as a record in England."
• "I always enjoyed doing transgender songs."
• "I buy a pair of sunglasses a week."
• "I can't say I was a Rasta but I went through a period when I was studying all aspects of Rastafarianism, including smoking a lot of pot while reading the Bible!"
• "I didn't really expect it to go anywhere."
• "I didn't see myself as gifted enough to do the work, but I did think I could stir things up enough to wake people and maybe inspire those who had the greatness and should be working."
• "I didn't think I was all of a sudden going to start doing poetry readings, or make a record and have a rock 'n' roll band."
• "I don't feel like I'm particularly deserving of the punk-rock laurel, since that was a movement that came after what my group did."
• "I had a really happy childhood - my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife."
• "I have 50's Vogues with early pan shots, pale roses and models with necks that went on forever."
• "I have a daughter who's 11 years old. Maybe she'll grow up independent and really really heavy and become a movie star and she'll play me in my life story."
• "I like gettin' old."
• "I look at these kids, you know, and I could be their mother, their mistress, their older woman. Some of the kids at the concerts are 15."
• "I met DeKooning once in a bar and he put his hand on my knee right away. I knew I could model for him."
• "I modeled at the Museum School."
• "I modeled for Robert Mapplethorpe."
• "I never thought I was gonna live to 30."
• "I only planned it out till I was 28. I figured at 28, the black dress, the gutter in Paris, I had it - like a B movie of Piaf."
• "I think I'm constantly in a state of adjustment."
• "I want to make 40. I want to see it."
• "I was still a baby bird when I was 28."
• "I went to Glassboro State Teacher's College in New Jersey, which was about all I could afford because I put myself through school."
• "I'd like to model for DeKooning."
• "I've always thrived on the encouragement of others."
• "If I have any regrets, I could say that I'm sorry I wasn't a better writer or a better singer."
• "In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth."
• "In fact, I thought my calling was to be a painter."
• "In the '70s, I had a very romantic idea about being out in the world and having a network of people working with me. I thought of it more as a military regiment."
• "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."
• "Let's just say that I think any person who aspires, presumes, or feels the calling to be an artist has a built-in sense of duty."
• "Maybe I'll be 48 and die in the gutter in Paris."
• "Mohammed personally mapped out seven heavens. If he got to seven, you know there's more."
• "My mother answers all my fan mail."
• "My sunglasses are like my guitar."
• "No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist."
• "Rimbaud was the first European to explore Ethiopia."
• "Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting."
• "That's something I learnt from Joan Baez, who often sang songs that had a male point of view."
• "The first record's like a book. It's like a poetry book."
• "The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication."
• "Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo - Jo being the writer and the misfit."
• "What I wanted to do in rock'n'roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison."
• "When I was in high school, to me being a model was the heaviest. It was the logical extension of being an artist's mistress."
• "When I was younger, I also dreamed of being an opera singer, simply because of Maria Callas."
• "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 went to Paris I stayed at this hotel called the Hotel Of Strangers, in the attic room where Charles Cros and Rimbaud lived together."
• "In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth."