Patti Smith Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

It drives me nuts when someone comes in and says 'Tell me your life story.' Do you have questions? I love questions, they always have the element of surprise!

Patti Smith
People have the power
To redeem the work of fools
Upon the meek the graces shower
It's decreed the people rule.

Patti Smith
Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe, love is a banquet on which we feed.

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

Patti Smith
Much has been said about Robert, and more will be added. Young men will adopt his gait. Young girls will wear white dresses and mourn his curls. He will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.

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

Patti Smith
So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.

Patti Smith
I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.

Patti Smith
The things I thought would happen didn't. Things I never anticipated unfolded.

Patti Smith
Look around you, all around you
Riding on a copper wave
Do you like the world around you?
Are you ready to behave?

Patti Smith
It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies

Patti Smith
Pollution is a necessary result of the inability of man to reform and transform waste.

Patti Smith
The neat thing about performing is it keeps the act of creation alive. I love the process of creation, although the end product in itself is a necessary evil. Still, I'm glad it's there, otherwise I wouldn't have Rolling Stones records and William Burroughs books to enjoy.

Patti Smith
What is the soul? What color is it? I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged.

Patti Smith
An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God.

Patti Smith
Life is filled with holes
Johnny's laying there in his sperm coffin
The angel looks down at him and says "Oh, pretty boy
Can't you show me nothing but surrender?
those who have sufered understand suffering and there by extend their hand "Patti Smith"

Patti Smith
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.

Patti Smith
Americans just don't know what being a movie star's all about.

Patti Smith
We never had any children," he said ruefully. "Our work was our children.

Patti Smith
Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?

Patti Smith
He spared the child and spoiled the rod
I have not sold myself to God!

Patti Smith
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.

Patti Smith
These are the times, the times of our own, these are the shapes the world we formed.

Patti Smith
The people have the power
The power to dream to rule
To wrestle the world from fools.

Patti Smith
We learned we wanted too much. We could only give from the perspective of who we were and what we had. Apart, we were able to see with even greater clarity that we didn't want to be without each other.

Patti Smith