Patti Smith Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

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

Patti Smith
I remember when you were born, it was dawn and the storm settled near my belly. And I rolled in the grass and spit out the gas, and I lit a match and the void went flash. And the sky split and the planets hit, balls of jade dropped and existence stopped.

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

Patti Smith
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.

Patti Smith
Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn't live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.

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

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
I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.

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

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

Patti Smith
Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.

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
Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.

Patti Smith
We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.

Patti Smith
Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

Patti Smith
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.

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

Patti Smith
Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.

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

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 learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth

Patti Smith
We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.

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