Patti Smith Quotes - Page 5

My sunglasses are like my guitar.

Look at Obama - he is now [2015] trying to help us environmentally but he should have done it eight years ago. He's trying to salvage his legacy and trying to do something good but we needed for him to show leadership from day one.

Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too.

One thing I like about getting older is things, your spectrum widens, your capacity for compassion widens.

I think its very important that we enjoy our life, that we get everything we can out of it.

I learned a lot from Arthur Rimbaud. People talk about how he wanted to be a seer and do that through the derangement of the senses. What they forget was that he also advocated, sternly and austerely, that one must be able to go through all that - and then articulate it.

I think it's good for people to see the positive beauty that can flower from the deepest grieving.

I love being alive. I like being a human being.

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

I wanted to remember the original energy; strip away all the glamour and limousines and tons of drugs. I wanted to get back to the revolutionary ideas, merging poetry and rhythm and rock and roll.

There's nothing cool about being self-destructive.

Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.

We tried not to age, but time had its rage.

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.

My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills... So my parents always struggled.

The sea is greater than us - it has its rhythm, its art. It comes with our earliest memory, of respiration, breathing in and out.

I immersed myself in books and rock 'n' roll, the adolescent salvation.

Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world.

It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to Him.

I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf.

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

I don't think anything can prepare you for one's losses.

I didn't waste my time on things I didn't love.