Patti Smith

Singer

1946-12-30

American singer, songwriter, poet, and visual artist who emerged from New York"s punk scene in the 1970s. Her work has influenced rock, punk, and alternative music across generations.

Quotes by Patti Smith

I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one
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I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.
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All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms.
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It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.
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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.
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It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).
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I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea.
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I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.
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He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.
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I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.
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Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down Desolation Row. I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.
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I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.
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He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin.
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We didn't have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.
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Please, no matter how we advance in technology please don't abandon the book-there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than a book.
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Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the
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I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,that Joplin had the last drunken throat,that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.
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Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.
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We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.
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Everything comes down so pasteurizedeverything comes down 16 degreesthey say your amplifier is too loudturn your amplifier downare we high all alone on our kneesmemory is just hips that swinglike a clockthe past projects fantastic scenestic/toc tic/toc tic/tocfuck the clock!
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