Quotes from Patti Smith

I get irritated with the world. I get irritated with politicians. I get very irritated with governments and with corporations, but in terms of imagination - my imagination is always fertile. I'm either thinking of my own things or constantly engaged by the things that other people do.

Pop music has always been about the mainstream and what appeals to the public.

I have bigger concerns than what pop stars are doing. I'm more concerned about our environment, what industrialists are doing to it.

I was born in 1946, so I was born on the tail end of when everything was deemed important. You made things to last. If you came from a poor family, there was only one can opener.

From very early on in my childhood - four, five years old - I felt alien to the human race. I felt very comfortable with thinking I was from another planet, because I felt disconnected - I was very tall and skinny, and I didn't look like anybody else, I didn't even look like any member of my family.

Good press, bad press, whatever, only means a lot to me if it's writ by somebody I respect, by somebody I like.

We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.

A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending.

I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written 'Just Kids' had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.

I always wrote. I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written 'Just Kids' had I not spent all of the '80s developing my craft as a writer.

I know what that tastes like, to be a rock-and-roll star - to have a limousine, to have girls screaming when they see you, girls trying to cut my hair, get a piece of me. But I don't walk around with a concept of myself as a rock-and-roll star, and certainly not as a musician, because I really can't play anything, except primitively.

So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.

I have loved books all my life. There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.

Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.

For everything bad, there's a million really exciting things, whether it's someone puts out a really great book, there's a new movie, there's a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, or you have the best cup of coffee you ever had in your life.

I come from a real working class background, and I didn't know anyone sophisticated - except I saw Edie Sedgewick once at the Art Museum in Philly. She had these black leotards and little black pumps and this big ermine cape and all these white dogs and black sunglasses and black eyes. She was classy!

My mission is to stay healthy and productive and serve as a good example.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

Outside of society, if you're looking that's where you'll find me.

I felt alien my whole life but I didn't feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.

Life is like a roller coaster. It's never going to be perfect - it is going to have perfect moments, and then rough spots, but it's all worth it.

I'm okay with roaming around the world in my bunk for days on end. Maybe every third day I'll get a shower or stumble out at dawn and realize I'm in a field in Poland. I like that kind of life.

Let's just say that I think any person who aspires, presumes, or feels the calling to be an artist has a built-in sense of duty.