Patti Smith
Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.Collection: Beautiful
Art is by nature optimistic. Art is optimistic because it is alive.Collection: Inspirational
We need a new cosmology. New gods. New sacraments. Another drink.Collection: Needs
Hey sister, you're just moving too fast, you're screwing up the quota.Collection: Work
Angel looks down at him and says, “Oh, pretty boy, Can't you show me nothing but surrender?Collection: Angel
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.Collection: Dream
I didn't waste my time on things I didn't love.Collection: Waste
The things I thought would happen didn't. Things I never anticipated unfolded.Collection: Happens
I don't think anything can prepare you for one's losses.Collection: Loss
It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to Him.Collection: Art
Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.Collection: Sea
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?Collection: Artist
I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.Collection: Artist
I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords.Collection: Rocks
I think some of that hopelessness of my generation got passed on to later generations - the sense of uselessness.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Rocks
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.Collection: Moving
I've embraced rock 'n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock 'n' roll. But I am also engaged in all of these things separately.Collection: Rocks
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.Collection: Writing
I don't have an image of myself, when I'm walking down the street, like I'm a rock star or something. I'm a human being, I'm a friend, I'm a mom, I'm a writer, and I'm an artist. I do play electric guitar and all of that but in the end I'm just a person. I really don't live like a rock star, economically or socially. I still live a pretty simple life beside the traveling aspect of it.Collection: Mom
I always wrote like rock 'n' roll. And I always listen to rock 'n' roll as poetry.Collection: Rocks
When I was working on the lyrics, I thought of all the lullabies we learn as children: "Away in the Manger," William Blake's lullabies. I realized that the key to lullabies is simplicity.Collection: Children
I started going to Bible school really early in life. Being raised a Jehovah's Witness, I had to read the Bible over and over. These stories were so horrifying and really difficult to reconcile. For me, Noah wasn't the story of the graham cracker box with the little animals it was horrifying. I would ask the same questions as a child. "Well, what about the little kids? What about the dogs and cats?"Collection: Dog
We have to believe, as creators - just like a doctor doing heart surgery has to believe that he can save that person's life. You have to believe that your pursuit is not just a noble pursuit, but a necessary and inborn pursuit to uncover something.Collection: Believe
In any performance, you're on stage for two hours, and there's 40 seconds or maybe a whole five minutes where you feel like the whole universe is in place, and you've gone even beyond the universe that you know.Collection: Hours
As a child I was such an intense daydreamer; I could be so gone that I had to be smacked to come back. They were really worried that I had some kind of catatonia or something because I would go so far out. Because all I wanted to do was talk to god as a child.Collection: Children
I have disciplined myself when I'm working. When I discovered art, I realized that one could keep that search going within creation. But I also realize that in order to create the art, you have to stay, you can't go too far.Collection: Art
Talking to god and coming back because that's what we have to do. That's your responsibility as a director, as an artist, as a performer. Your responsibility is back again to your people.Collection: Responsibility
Sometimes I get lost in watching a film. The sorrow, or the frustration, is when it doesn't happen for a long time.Collection: Frustration
I'm very comfortable with being a female now but when I was a little kid I only wanted to be a boy. I didn't want to be a girl. I didn't feel like a man inside... being a boy was just cooler.Collection: Girl
What helps me is watching other people negotiate loss. I think about how we dropped a bomb on people in Hiroshima and 150,000 people were killed in one night. Those people had to mourn and they had to rebuild their city right away.Collection: Loss
I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written Just Kids had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.Collection: Kids
Not everything we do as artists has deep intent. If we push barriers, that's great, but sometimes we just do our work. Whether we make some kind of statement, consciously or unconsciously, we shouldn't take the innocence away from what we do.Collection: Artist
We're a culture more than ever that wants proof of everything, we want things fast, and someone sends you an email, you want to answer in five minutes. We have to allow ourselves nothingness, in our relationships too.Collection: Email
Arthur Conan Doyle had to be Sherlock Holmes in order to envision how Sherlock Holmes would unravel a mystery. He had to be in Sherlock's situations. As a writer, you have to be of two minds.Collection: Order
I watch a lot of crime shows. The head investigator always said to the crime solver, "What do you say?" And inevitably the other has to say something like, "Well I'm thinking he was shot in the neck with a certain gun and he seemed to be running." The solver has to picture what he's seeing first, and then express his own observations. The writer does the same.Collection: Running
When I was home, traditionally since I was young, I'd write in cafés. That was the romantic notion in 1963. Café atmospheres back then were different. The café life really stemmed from the Parisians' idea of it, with poets struggling over their poems and drinking coffee. No music, no sounds, maybe a little jazz, or soul, but mostly nothing. Now you go into a café and the music is really loud, people are having business meetings, they are on their cellphones. It changes from generation to generation.Collection: Drinking
Sometimes you have to abandon your own children for other children.Collection: Children
I hate to be enclosed. I don't like bathroom doors - I don't shut them. In fact, in my house, I have no doors.Collection: Hate
I want to keep my life as unfettered as possible. So maybe I'll just pretend to get rare books from my catalogue, and not really get them.Collection: Book
[Steven Sebring] presence was also nice for my children, who, having just lost their father, quite naturally craved warm male attention. They gravitated to him right away.Collection: Children
My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.Collection: Style
My public life was so demanding that I wasn't doing the things that I deemed the most important.Collection: Important
You don't want to OD on improvisation.Collection: Crafts
I think its very important to not be afraid to experience joy in the middle of sorrow.Collection: Thinking
With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn't know who to work with.Collection: Photograph
I had met Michael Stipe, and he was such a kind person, and extremely understanding, so I asked him if he knew a photographer who would come to Detroit, where I lived, who would be child friendly and who would respect my home. Michael suggested Steven [ Sebring]. One day a knock came at my door, and when I opened it, there was Steven. He's been like a brother ever since.Collection: Brother
Steven [Sebring] just fell in with my family life. He helped me wash the dishes and play with the kids. I could tell that he was a person who understood families.Collection: Kids
My mother loved rock and roll. She loved high-energy music.Collection: Mother