Quotes from Patti Smith

My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination.

When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.

He figured out what he wanted to see by seeing himself." (About Robert Mapplethorpe)

It occurs to me that the young look beautiful as they sleep and the old, such as myself, look dead.

Everything here is a small offense and not of value as art or confession. It is not a whim. It is an attempt to peel another putrid skin.

Most often the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself, if not embedded in the coiling ridges of the mind.

I did not ask the sign how my husband fared in whatever space was allotted to him in the universe. I did not ask the fate of Sandy. Or Sam. Those things are forbidden, as entreating the angels with prayer. I know that very well, one cannot ask for a life, or two lives. One can only warrant the hope of an increasing potency in each man's heart.

Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don't make compromises, don't worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.

On Friday, the thirteenth of July, I gave a reading in memory of Jim Morrison on the roof of underground filmmaker Jack Smith's loft at Greene Street and Canal.

I awoke with a mild hangover.

I packed my small suitcase in a haze of nostalgia for the present stream I was just about to divert, a handful of days in a world of my own making, fragile as a temple constructed with wooden matchsticks.

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. -- Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don´t go. Don´t grow.

Love is an angel disguised as lust.

It ain't so easy writing about nothin

Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.

I could feel progress and left with a little bit of optimism. -- Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is.

Robert morente, creava il silenzio. Io, destinata alla vita, prestai ascolto a un silenzio che avrebbe richiesto un'esistenza intera per trovare le parole.

I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon.

It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.

I could feel the insidious fingers of memory rustling through the underbrush like the dismembered hand of the pianist scrabbling toward Peter Lorre's throat in The Beast with Five Fingers.

It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.

That is death. A disappearing act.

There was an air of vague and unsettling paranoia, an undercurrent of rumors, snatched fragments of conversation anticipating future revolution.

What is the heart but a small hand of agonies?