Patti Smith
It was always my belief that rock and roll belonged in the hands of the people, not rock stars.
There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it's really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work.
I want to be around a really long time. I want to be a thorn in the side of everything as long as possible.
I've always believed in having a sense of balance and stealth.
Throughout my life, I happily deferred to family, companions, children.
The cult of celebrity in the '60s and '70s was really more reserved for movie stars or high socialites. Paparazzi didn't care about Janis Joplin.
I liked being on stage; I just didn't like the theatrical aspect of being in front of people.
When I did 'Horses,' I never expected to make another album.
I would rather write or record something great and have it overlooked than do mediocre work and have it be popular.
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.
What I say should always be prefaced with this: I'm not really politically articulate. I just try to be like Thomas Paine: what is common sense? So when I say these things to you, I am speaking from a humanist point of view. I just look around and see what's wrong.
I've lost lots of men in my life, besides my mother, which is a whole different loss.
I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work.
Ornette Coleman is a real musician. He takes all of the things he's thinking about in the world - which is a whole universe upon universe - and translates this into music.
My siblings were a bit younger than me, and I was always entertaining them and making up stories.
As I go through life, I can see why my mother directed me that way, or why my father counseled me in that way. But some things you're open to when you're young, and some things you need to find out for yourself. I think that that's pretty universal.
I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.
I am still a very optimistic person. I continue to do work with joy.
Maybe I'll be 48 and die in the gutter in Paris.
I know what that tastes like, to be a rock-and-roll star - to have a limousine, to have girls screaming when they see you, girls trying to cut my hair, get a piece of me. But I don't walk around with a concept of myself as a rock-and-roll star, and certainly not as a musician, because I really can't play anything, except primitively.
Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody - Paris for me was a Mecca.
The thing I've always liked about performing is that I decide what I want to wear, whether I want to comb my hair.
Americans just don't know what being a movie star's all about.
The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.
I never thought I was gonna live to 30.
I know that some people have different personas for the different things they do, and I'm not criticizing that - maybe it's a good thing - but I'm the same old person, so I take everything in stride.
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 quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice.
I had a really happy childhood - my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife.
We never threw a record together. Each record was done really seriously, as if our life depended on it.
I love playing the Fillmore. I love the walk from the hotel and climbing up those old, iron stairs that lead to the stage. I imagine Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors and all those other great bands climbing those same stairs.
I remember the first club we played in San Francisco. There were a lot of people on motorcycles standing around outside, and I had trouble getting in. I didn't have any ID, and the guy at the door wouldn't let me in, even though I told him I was gonna be singing in there.
What I wanted in life always was to write something as good as 'Pinocchio.' I wanted to write. I wanted to evolve. I wanted to grow.
Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star.
The only thing I daydreamed about was being an opera singer. But I was so skinny and so pathetic that that sort of wasn't going to happen.
I don't stay in one discipline because it's more lucrative than another. In fact, the most successful thing I ever did was 'Just Kids,' for which I had absolutely no expectations.
I was actually born in Chicago, and then when I was a toddler, my parents moved to Philadelphia.
Of course, every artist has 'minor works' that they do, but I don't think I have any 'minor disciplines.' Each discipline I approach as a major undertaking that I put my whole self into.
My mission is to stay healthy and productive and serve as a good example.
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.
My father was a dreamy fellow - he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games.
I'm not afraid of terrorism at all. I'm afraid of loss of our freedom, loss of mobility, loss of global comradeship.
One of my great goals when I first started taking photographs or showing them publicly is that people might want one for over their desk. That's my goal.
A lot of children don't have a developed aesthetic. I did. I made early choices in life, even about cloth; I liked flannel and not polyester.
A day doesn't go by where I don't create something.
My mother and father had so many ups and downs and stayed with each other and helped each other. My mother took in ironing and she was a waitress. My father was working in the factory and he did people's tax returns.
I think we have a creative impulse where suffering can magnify our work, but so can joy. You can be in love and write the greatest love song ever. Sometimes I think too much suffering makes it difficult to do one's work.
I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.
I don't believe any artist who says, 'I had to do that because DJs will tell me I can't play that music. I will lose my job.' Well, lose the job and create a new job. If your label won't let you have the cover you want or sing the songs you want, then leave!