Quotes from Patti Smith

I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it." - reference to Andy Warhol

I hated the soup and felt little for the can.

Angel looks down at him and says, "Oh, pretty boy, Can't you show me nothing but surrender?

It seemed as if the whole of the world was slowly being stripped of innocence. Or maybe I was seeing a little too clearly.

The trouble with dreaming is that we eventually wake up.

Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can't draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.

I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates ...

Nobody sees as we do, Patti" he said again. Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was as if we were the only two people in the world.

In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.

He contained, even at an early age, a stirring and the desire to stir.

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.

He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language.

To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.

We promised that we'd never leave one another again, until we both knew we were ready to stand on our own. And this vow, through everything we were yet to go through, we kept.

I thought of something I learned from reading Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas by Mari Sandoz. Crazy Horse believes that he will be victorious in battle, but if he stops to take spoils from the battlefield, he will be defeated. He tattoos lightning bolts on the ears of his horses so the sight of them will remind him of this as he rides. I tried to apply this lesson to the things at hand, careful not to take spoils that were not rightfully mine.

Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.

I didn't feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.

I was too curious about the future to look back.

What is nothing? I impetuously asked. -It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.

Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.

I imagined a lot of things. That I would shine. That I'd be good. I'd dwell bareheaded on a summit turning a wheel that would turn the earth undetected, amongst the clouds, I would have some influence; be of some avail.

Nothing is ever solved, Solving is an illusion. There are moments of spontaneous brightness, when the mind appears emancipated, but this is more epiphany.

If I got lost along the way I had a compass that I had found embedded in a pile of wet leaves I was kicking my way through. The compass was old and rusted but it still worked, connecting the earth and stars. It told me where I was standing and which way was west but not where I was going and nothing of my worth.

I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-changed.