Quotes from Patti Smith

I was a sickly child, not very strong physically. I wasn't really the greatest in school. I didn't really excel in anything particularly. But I was happy with who I was.

You can't carve up the world. It's not a pie.

I personally am not interested in people trying to pigeonhole me.

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.

People came at me with all sorts of offers, wanting to make me into a hard-core Cher. I had no desire for any amount of money to be reformed for someone's vision, because in the end, that's what you got: your clay in someone else's hands.

Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star.

Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.

Everyone thinks of God as a man - you can't help it - Santa Claus was a man, therefore God has to be a man.

Pollution is a necessary result of the inability of man to reform and transform waste.

My mother answers all my fan mail.

For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day.

My mother loved rock and roll. She loved high-energy music.

My mother had no end of tragedy in her life. She would make herself get up and take a deep breath and go out and do laundry. Hang up sheets.

My father's mother was from Liverpool and she had this very beautiful English china. I only wanted to drink my cocoa out of my grandmother's cup and saucer.

I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

Art is by nature optimistic. Art is optimistic because it is alive.

These are the times, the times of our own, these are the shapes the world we formed.

I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords.

My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.

I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry.

I wanted to remember the original energy; strip away all the glamour and limousines and tons of drugs. I wanted to get back to the revolutionary ideas, merging poetry and rhythm and rock and roll.

I think it's good for people to see the positive beauty that can flower from the deepest grieving.

People have the power to redeem the work of fools.

The people have the power to redeem the work of fools. Upon the meek the graces shower, it's decreed the people rule.