Patti Smith
People like beauty and purity. They pretend that's what it's all about.Collection: People
I was real religious when I was young. I wanted to be a missionary.Collection: Religious
My father was always talking about God, and I idolized my father, so I'd spend hours trying to have mental telepathy with God.Collection: Father
I feel about politics the same way I do about religion: I find the best I can from different things.Collection: Different
I had this idea that the coolest thing that could happen to you was talking with God.Collection: Talking
I'm a total failure at housewifery. I always have been, 'cause I daydream too much. If I start doing the dishes at one in the afternoon, I'll still be there at six in the evening.Collection: Afternoon
I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.Collection: Thinking
So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.Collection: Sleep
The only parts I like out of any of those women books is the dirty parts. But I don't think their dirty parts are any good, really.Collection: Dirty
When I stopped performing for 16 years and lived in Michigan and was married and raising my children, I wrote about four or five books. I haven't published them.Collection: Children
I can't judge how another person does their [music] work. Everyone has a choice and the music industry is much more open that it was when I was younger. Certain things are gone, others have developed, but everyone makes their choices. Pop music has always been about the mainstream and what appeals to the public. I don't feel it's my place to judge. I just look at things as a fan, I like or or I don't like it.Collection: Judging
I think guys are more emotional. Men are supposed to be the strong ones, they have pressure on them to be strong, but when it comes to sex men are much more emotional than women.Collection: Strong
That whole thing about masturbating. Most girls, I guess nobody has to tell them, they just figure it out. I had to be told. Some girl actually had to show me a hairbrush and demonstrate exactly what to do. I just never figured that stuff out naturally.Collection: Girl
I was so involved in my boy-rhythms that I never came to grips with the fact that I was a girl. I was twelve years old when my mother took me inside and said, "You can't be outside wrestling without a T-shirt on." It was a trauma.Collection: Girl
I was always trying to pick guys up. I'd ask guys out and stuff like that. I had no pride. I was the biggest lurch at dances, waiting for the ladies' choice. I'd lunge at my prey like a baby wolf.Collection: Baby
I didn't want any middle-of-the-road creep. I always wanted the toughest guy in school, the guy from south Philly who wore tight black pants. Y'know, the guy who carried the umbrella and wore white shirts with real thin black ties. I was really nuts over this guy named Butchie Magic 'cause he let me carry his switchblade.Collection: Real
I never had any dates. I never really had any boyfriends. I was the girl who did the guys' homework. I was really crazy about guys but I was always like one of the boys. The guys I always fell in love with were completely inaccessible.Collection: Girl
I was so horny in school it felt like my body was filled with electricity. I felt like I had neon bones or something.Collection: School
I was like one of the boys in school who flap their legs frantically under the desk. I always had this weird feeling between my legs and I had no idea what it was. I didn't know girls masturbated. I never touched myself or anything.Collection: Girl
I was horny, but I was innocent 'cause I was a real-late bloomer and not particularly attractive. In fact, homely.Collection: Real
I don't think people should do biopics of living people. I'm totally opposed to that.Collection: Thinking
After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.Collection: Writing
As an artist, I used to think that my responsibility was to do good work. But I had to learn from the 70s on that being a public figure presents another aspect of responsibility.Collection: Responsibility
He found it was as easy to hurl beauty as anything else. (On Robert Mapplethorpe)Collection: Easy
It's no secret - I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all.Collection: Secret
My father came a couple of times, but he always blamed his hearing loss on my loud amplifiers. So he didn't come anymore, but I had his support.Collection: Couple
If I'm really working on something, writing or painting or really concentrating, I don't even think about brushing my hair.Collection: Writing
When I was a teenager, I dreamed of being an opera singer like Maria Callas or a jazz singer like June Christy or Chris Connor, or approaching songs with the kind of mystical lethargy of Billie Holiday, or championing the downtrodden like Lotte Lenya. But I never dreamed of singing in a rock-and-roll band.Collection: Song
My mission is to communicate, to wake people up, just to give them my energy and accept theirs.Collection: People
I got my style from a lot of different people, even my style of reading, even Johnny Carson inspired me.Collection: Reading
When I'm on my own with my camera, taking these pictures, it feels as if I am in a room of my own, a self-contained world.Collection: Self
New generations are intoxicated with the idea that they can make their presence known on the Internet. When I was young, there wasn't anything comparable. Very few got their picture in a magazine, fewer made records. We have to stand back and let them get their footing. Hopefully they'll come to the realization that the most important thing is their work and how they conduct themselves.Collection: Ideas
Life is like a roller coaster. It's never going to be perfect - it is going to have perfect moments, and then rough spots, but it's all worth it.Collection: Perfect
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.Collection: Spiritual
I don't know about that. I'm not a very analytical person. I have various impulses. I've often quoted Walt Whitman's phrase "I contain multitudes." I understand that.Collection: Phrases
The film [Dream of Life], in the end, is life-affirming, and I think it's always useful for people to be reminded that no matter how rough things get, no matter what kind of twists and turns our lives can take, we can keep going, we can create something new.Collection: Dream
I'm certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.Collection: Art
Deep in my heart how the presence of you shines, in a light to last a whole life through.Collection: Friendship
What I've always tried to do is to express the highest point of me, and rock 'n' roll is the first and the most open form created by our generation. The cool thing about it is that you get the power, you get the rhythm; you can be taken over sexually, you can be taken over cerebrally; it's great to look at - it's a package deal.Collection: Taken
We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.Collection: Black
My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.Collection: Photography
A writer, or any artist, can’t expect to be embraced by the people [but] you just keep doing your work - because you have to, because it’s your calling.Collection: Artist
I hadn't performed or been in the public eye for about 16 years. When my husband passed away, I was obliged to go back to work to take care of our kids. I also wanted to do a record in memory of him. So we did Gone Again. During that process, I had to be photographed and had to go back to doing articles and interviews.Collection: Memories
I know fashion is a material thing, but we live in a material world and I love clothes.Collection: Fashion
Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people.Collection: Song
The only way I can lose my mind in bed is to destroy myself in a fantasy.Collection: Mind
Punk rock is just another word for freedom.Collection: Rocks
Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.Collection: Summer