Patti Smith Quotes - Page 16

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.

Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.

Blessedness is within us all.

For I desired, as Youth does, to be taken by the hand and hurled into the world.

One day we’ll go in together, and the work will be ours.

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.

That whole thing about masturbating. Most girls, I guess nobody has to tell them, they just figure it out. I had to be told. Some girl actually had to show me a hairbrush and demonstrate exactly what to do. I just never figured that stuff out naturally.

It's not that I have compromised or anything, but it's always been important to me to take good care of myself and be a good example. I'm not much a role model in terms of hair care, though.

I realize that people need something to believe in.

I had this idea that the coolest thing that could happen to you was talking with God.

My father was always talking about God, and I idolized my father, so I'd spend hours trying to have mental telepathy with God.

I was real religious when I was young. I wanted to be a missionary.

I feel about politics the same way I do about religion: I find the best I can from different things.

People say the media is feeding the public's hunger for celebrity news, but that's the drug pusher's mentality. I don't think anybody would be pining for news about Angelina Jolie's babies if it weren't being given to them in the first place.

It's no secret - I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all.

I'm not a critic. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a philosopher. Arguing that punk has run its course is like saying painting ran its course after the Renaissance. Punk is an idea. It's freedom. And it'll be around 200 years from now for the people who want it.

My parents were very well read. They were both New Englanders, not highly educated, but they had a sophisticated... they were both very humanistic, and they were sophisticated readers.

In 1974, when I started working with the material that became Horses, a lot of our great voices had died. We'd lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

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.

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.

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.

I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.

Spare the child and spoil the rod, I am not sellin' myself to god.

More than anything that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.

I always hesitate when people call me a musician.I have had no musical training. I can't play anything. I really think of myself as a performer. It's always been writing for me. I evolved with my band in rock 'n' roll through poetry, not through music.