Quotes from Patti Smith

The sea is greater than us - it has its rhythm, its art. It comes with our earliest memory, of respiration, breathing in and out.

I think masturbating is a really important function in art. People don't like to hear that kind of stuff, but it's true.

I'm an artist. I'm interested in how art gets made.

When I was a child, I was certain that I could remember what it was like to live on Venus; I could remember what it was like to live in the American Plains. I could remember. And it's ancient memory. We all have it. It's just that some of us access it more than others.

You can't work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.

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.

There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it's really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work.

I think it's really great that people share their work [on Myspace] and no one is paying for it. I think that's a very healthy thing and it's not a corporate thing.

With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn't know who to work with.

We never had any children," he said ruefully. "Our work was our children.

One day we'll go in together, and the work will be ours.

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

I believe myself to be an artist. That was my calling, to do my work, and what's most important to me is to do the best work I possibly can. And that is what means the most, that is what will endure.

I don't feel that censorship keeps me from doing the work, though. I'm my bigger censor.

When you do controversial work, you're going to upset a certain amount of people.

Committing great work does not necessarily feed you.

I didn't know Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, but I was affected by both of their deaths because I admired their work so much and mourned their youth and work they would never produce.

What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.

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.

I was studying Francis of Assisi for quite some time, when Benedict was still the pope. And I was studying it for a song that I did for my last album, 'Banga.'

My style says, 'Look at me, don't look at me.'

I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.

I'm not a very analytical person.

Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too.