Patti Smith Quotes - Page 12

I hate to be enclosed. I don't like bathroom doors - I don't shut them. In fact, in my house, I have no doors.

Obviously, I'm not homeless. I'm not an old alcoholic. I'm not jumping trains. I just like to live in a certain way.

I'm from South Jersey: The idea of eating a roll with olive oil and anchovies or some kind of sardine and drinking mint tea definitely comes from reading Paul Bowles.

By the time I was 10 or 11, I was completely demoralized. I thought, "I'm done. I'm never going to be a missionary," because my indiscretion column, whether it was little lies or stealing a Chunky bar, kept me from sainthood.

From very early on in my childhood - four, five years old - I felt alien to the human race. I felt very comfortable with thinking I was from another planet, because I felt disconnected - I was very tall and skinny, and I didn't look like anybody else, I didn't even look like any member of my family.

My mission is to communicate, to wake people up, just to give them my energy and accept theirs.

My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.

Sometimes [people] seem to think I came out of the womb, you know, cursing, with an electric guitar.

I got my style from a lot of different people, even my style of reading, even Johnny Carson inspired me.

I wasn't a stranger to hard times. I used to read the Bible - well, I still do, but when I was young I read the Bible quite a bit.

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.

I just like living in certain atmospheres. Or I just like people as they are.

I'm very comfortable with being a female now but when I was a little kid I only wanted to be a boy. I didn't want to be a girl. I didn't feel like a man inside... being a boy was just cooler.

I wanted to go to Portland because it's a really good book town.

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.

A lot of children don't have a developed aesthetic. I did. I made early choices in life, even about cloth; I liked flannel and not polyester.

No one knows how powerful technology is.

Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star.

First of all, anybody who has lasted 30 and went through the 60's is really a survivor.

Sometimes you have to abandon your own children for other children.

When I was home, traditionally since I was young, I'd write in cafés. That was the romantic notion in 1963. Café atmospheres back then were different. The café life really stemmed from the Parisians' idea of it, with poets struggling over their poems and drinking coffee. No music, no sounds, maybe a little jazz, or soul, but mostly nothing. Now you go into a café and the music is really loud, people are having business meetings, they are on their cellphones. It changes from generation to generation.

I always know that everything I do is the best I could do.

In the '50s you had to wear pink ribbons if you were a girl, and you were supposed to become a hairdresser or a secretary. I couldn't stomach it. Later on, when I fell in love with my husband and had children, that's when my mother's earthiness or sense of femaleness kicked in.

Maybe I'll be 48 and die in the gutter in Paris.

My mother answers all my fan mail.