Quotes from Patti Smith

Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

What is the song about? I asked. -Death, he answered with a laugh. But don't worry, nobody dies, it is the death of love.

Looking back, long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.

Perhaps it's not where we're going but just that we go.

Everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums.

Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know.

Time to travel, to acquiesce to fate.

Friendship makes thieves of us all

Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.

Nessuno mi stava aspettando. Ma mi aspettava ogni cosa.

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.

It was February 14 and I was about to give my heart to a perfect cup of coffee.

Even as a child, I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want to wear red lipstick.

Laughter. An essential ingredient for survival. And we laughed a lot.

Spanish pilgrims travel on Camino de Santiago from monastery to monastery, collecting small medals to attach to their rosary as proof of their steps. I have stacks of Polaroids, each marking my own, that I sometimes spread out like tarots or baseball cards of an imagined celestial team.

Fate has a hand but is not the hand.

You don't see things like that. You feel them, as in all important things; they arrive, they come into your dreams.

We were evolving with different needs. I needed to explore beyond myself and Robert needed to search within himself. He explored the vocabulary of his work, and as his components shifted and morphed, he was in effect creating a diary of his internal evolution, heralding the emergence of a suppressed sexual identity.

Question everything.

And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos—the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book.

Americans just don't know what being a movie star's all about.

Nothing was spoken, it was just mutually understood.