Patti Smith Quotes - Page 6

All I've ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful.

Toyland, toyland . . . once you pass its portals you may never return again.

Social media could be very strong in terms of bringing people together but it also takes up so much of people's time that I wonder if we've lost the ability to daydream.

Will you pretend you're my boyfriend?

What I really like is an intelligent review. It doesn't have to be positive. A review that has some kind of insight, and sometimes people say something that's startling or is so poignant.

What is the soul? What color is it? I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged.

I wasn't writing, I wasn't drawing, and personality-wise, I was just completely arrogant. I'm not trying to be overly apologetic for my behavior - I wasn't evil. The lifestyle I had was one that lent itself to becoming more and more self-involved.

If the postman is saying hello to you, then I feel like, wow, thats something special.

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.

I'd never had people drive me around, and then all of a sudden, if a car didn't come, I'd say, "Where's my car?"

My father was a dreamy fellow - he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games.

Angel looks down at him and says, “Oh, pretty boy, Can't you show me nothing but surrender?

Hey sister, you're just moving too fast, you're screwing up the quota.

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

As an artist, I never wanted to be fettered by gender nor recognized or defined as a female poet, musician or singer. They don't do that with men - nobody says Picasso, the male artist. Curators call me up and say, "We want your work to be in a show about women artists," and I'm like, why? For Christ's sake, do we have to attach a gender onto everything?

I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.

I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords.

I've said this over and over, but I'll say it a million more times - I'm concerned more about the death of a bee than I am about terrorism. Because we're losing hives and bees by the millions because of such strong pesticides.

I think some of that hopelessness of my generation got passed on to later generations - the sense of uselessness.

The best thing is to motivate people to do their own work. I'm not opposed to making money. But I started to play rock 'n' roll to motivate others, to shake things up, wake people up and to let other skinny, pimply marginalized weirdos know they're not alone.

I know I'm a strong performer. I'm not an evolved musician.

An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn't know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch.

I always wrote like rock 'n' roll. And I always listen to rock 'n' roll as poetry.

When I started making music, we'd lost a lot of our great people. Rock was moving in a direction I didn't like. Rock was my generation's revolutionary, sexual, poetic, and political voice, but it had become corporatized. It was going into stadiums. It was so far removed from its basic roots.

What is the impulse that drove to direct? To me, it seems so immense. Just having a rock 'n' roll band, or to go from the solitude of writing and to having to collaborate, is almost schizophrenic.