Patti Smith Quotes - Page 4

When I'm on my own with my camera, taking these pictures, it feels as if I am in a room of my own, a self-contained world.

New generations are intoxicated with the idea that they can make their presence known on the Internet. When I was young, there wasn't anything comparable. Very few got their picture in a magazine, fewer made records. We have to stand back and let them get their footing. Hopefully they'll come to the realization that the most important thing is their work and how they conduct themselves.

Life is like a roller coaster. It's never going to be perfect - it is going to have perfect moments, and then rough spots, but it's all worth it.

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.

I don't know about that. I'm not a very analytical person. I have various impulses. I've often quoted Walt Whitman's phrase "I contain multitudes." I understand that.

The film [Dream of Life], in the end, is life-affirming, and I think it's always useful for people to be reminded that no matter how rough things get, no matter what kind of twists and turns our lives can take, we can keep going, we can create something new.

Good news doesn't necessarily have to be a positive thing. Bringing good news is imparting hope to one's fellow man.

I'm certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

An artist wears his work in place of wounds.

Deep in my heart how the presence of you shines, in a light to last a whole life through.

What I've always tried to do is to express the highest point of me, and rock 'n' roll is the first and the most open form created by our generation. The cool thing about it is that you get the power, you get the rhythm; you can be taken over sexually, you can be taken over cerebrally; it's great to look at - it's a package deal.

We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.

I hadn't performed or been in the public eye for about 16 years. When my husband passed away, I was obliged to go back to work to take care of our kids. I also wanted to do a record in memory of him. So we did Gone Again. During that process, I had to be photographed and had to go back to doing articles and interviews.

A writer, or any artist, can’t expect to be embraced by the people [but] you just keep doing your work - because you have to, because it’s your calling.

I know fashion is a material thing, but we live in a material world and I love clothes.

My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people.

The only way I can lose my mind in bed is to destroy myself in a fantasy.

New York is the thing that seduced me. New York is the thing that formed me. New York is the thing that deformed me. New York is the thing that perverted me. New York is the thing that converted me. And New York is the thing that I love too.

No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist.

I'm not afraid of terrorism at all. I'm afraid of loss of our freedom, loss of mobility, loss of global comradeship.

Punk rock is just another word for freedom.

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.

I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

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