Quotes from Patti Smith

As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag.

I never thought I was gonna live to 30.

It's not that I have compromised or anything, but it's always been important to me to take good care of myself and be a good example. I'm not much a role model in terms of hair care, though.

I was raised Jehovah's Witness. I was in Bible school at five or six years old, but I wouldn't say that we were a religious family.

What I say should always be prefaced with this: I'm not really politically articulate. I just try to be like Thomas Paine: what is common sense? So when I say these things to you, I am speaking from a humanist point of view. I just look around and see what's wrong.

Robert Mapplethorpe, I met in 1967. He was a student at Pratt, though even as a student a fully formed artist. We went through many things in our life together. He became my loved one, then my best friend.

The reason we did 'Land of a Thousand Dances' and 'Gloria' on 'Horses' was because I liked repetitious, three-chord rock songs, but I didn't understand that I could write my own. I didn't realize that you could use those chords a million times.

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

Deep in my heart how the presence of you shines, in a light to last a whole life through.

I think its very important that we enjoy our life, that we get everything we can out of it.

I've lost many, many friends through natural causes, through alcohol, through drugs, through AIDS. And every time I lose a friend or a loved one, it reminds me how great life is.

More than anything that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.

Steven [Sebring] just fell in with my family life. He helped me wash the dishes and play with the kids. I could tell that he was a person who understood families.

Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.

I think that there is an air of experience and aesthetic sophistication that weaves in with the amateur aspects of the film [Dream of Life]; it gives the film a certain elegance.

The hand above turns those leaves of loves, all in all a timeless view. Each dream of life flung from paradise everlasting, ever new.

The film [Dream of Life] is the way it is because it was the rhythm of my life, and also because the director and the editor are both gifted and both fine human beings.

The film [Dream of Life] looks at a time in my life.

My public life was so demanding that I wasn't doing the things that I deemed the most important.

I want to keep my life as unfettered as possible. So maybe I'll just pretend to get rare books from my catalogue, and not really get them.

You're not a rock 'n' roll person four hours a day or even when you're on stage. It's become the rhythm of your whole life.

Sometimes you're doing really well, then, after three or four years, everything inexplicably crashes like a house of cards and you have to rebuild it. It's not like you get to a point where you're all right for the rest of your life.

I remember when the Bic pen was controversial. They came from France. They were cheap, and when one was out of ink, you threw it away; you didn't dip it into more ink.

We never threw a record together. Each record was done really seriously, as if our life depended on it.